Nick Cohen – The Spectatorhttp://www.spectator.co.uk
The oldest continuously published magazine in the English language.Fri, 09 Dec 2016 10:28:29 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Which side are you on?http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/a-warning-for-trumps-new-apologists-cowardice-must-always-be-paid-for/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/a-warning-for-trumps-new-apologists-cowardice-must-always-be-paid-for/#respondThu, 17 Nov 2016 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=10019702Trump’s victory sets a test for conservatives, a test they are failing with embarrassing ineptitude. They are making the oldest…

]]>Trump’s victory sets a test for conservatives, a test they are failing with embarrassing ineptitude. They are making the oldest mistake in politics. They are carrying on as if nothing has changed.

In the early 21st century, it was easy to attack the supposed liberal left. These alleged liberals were for real censorship. The white working class was their enemy. Radical Islam was the fascism of the time, yet liberals who thought themselves anti-fascists accepted that misogyny, prejudice and hatred of individual rights were fine, as long as the haters had brown rather than white skin.

Apparently moral conservative writers joined the democratic left in tearing into such double standards. Yet in the background hung questions they should never have been allowed to duck. What does it mean to be a conservative? What are conservatives for?

Now we have, if not a new fascism, at least a new nationalist authoritarianism. But conservative politicians and the media’s claque of Tory talking heads are unable to oppose it.

Instead they have doubled down on liberal hypocrisy. Trump incites his fans to attack reporters. He wants to ‘open up’ America’s libel laws to make it easier for rich men to sue news organisations that do not treat them with enough deference. There is even talk among his supporters of a Trump presidency sending state inquisitors into universities to root out academic bias. Maybe I do not read as widely as I should. But I have not seen any of the conservatives who condemn the ‘Stepford students’ take on these threats to free speech. Censorship, it appears, is deplorable when it is enforced by their opponents but unremarkable when enacted by their friends.

The white working class, for whom they expressed such concern, appear to be as dispensable as the freedom to speak and write without punishment. Why aren’t our new tribunes of the proletariat raising their indomitable voices against Trump’s tax plans? They are nothing more than a swindle, which will see Trump’s household and all other households in the top 0.1 per cent receive a cut in their tax bills averaging $1.1 million.

Listen to Rod Liddle and Nick Cohen clashing on the ‘new normal’ in world politics

I am not going to go on about the attacks on women, Latinos and blacks — let’s just say that you cannot deplore the left’s indulgence of Islamist reaction if you don’t also condemn these. Nor will I linger on how those who make so much of their opposition to the ‘establishment’ and the ‘elite’ are falling over themselves to excuse a nepotistic and corrupt president-elect, who lets his son-in-law run his transition team and refuses to put his investments in a blind trust. I will not even give you a lecture on how a right that tells us not to get ‘hysterical’ about Trump’s support for Putin can’t go on to denounce Corbyn’s admiration for Russian gangsterism.

The point surely is that conservatives are trying to have it all ways. On the one hand, they say they support the rule of law, freedom of speech, the independence of the judiciary and the sovereignty of Parliament. On the other, they sniff the air like tomcats and sense the growing power of the radical right. Rather than deal with accusations of treachery from their own side, rather than face the discomfort of breaking from their herd, they have decided to become its fellow travellers.

George Orwell provided the clearest warning against refusing to see the darkness in your midst. He said to the left intellectuals who went along with Stalin: ‘Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the bootlicking propagandist of the Soviet regime and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.’

The same applies to the bootlicking apologists for Trump. You have to choose. Are you radical right or respectable right? For you surely can’t be both.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/a-warning-for-trumps-new-apologists-cowardice-must-always-be-paid-for/feed/0Republican presidential elect Donald Trump meets withfeaturedMay’s head on the blockhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/theresa-mays-cynical-brexit-stance-has-put-her-head-on-the-block/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/theresa-mays-cynical-brexit-stance-has-put-her-head-on-the-block/#respondThu, 13 Oct 2016 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9985072Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away…

]]>Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away with it, and you will see it is reconstituting the oldest and dirtiest alliance in Tory-history: the alliance between snobs and mobs.

I accept it takes a while to see our new rulers for what they are. Theresa May represents the dormitory town of Maidenhead. Although Eton College is just a few miles down the Thames valley, she could not be further socially and intellectually from David Cameron’s public school chumocracy. As for inciting mobs, what more ridiculous charge could I level against her? May seems to have no need to incite anyone. The far left has destroyed the opposition so thoroughly it will take Labour a generation to recover. A Conservative party that officially wanted to keep us in the European Union, then lost the referendum and its prime minister and chancellor, is nevertheless so far ahead in the polls it would win a landslide if there were an election tomorrow.

For all her apparent dominance, May’s cynicism and folly is forcing her to turn-brutish. She is going for a hard Brexit, which the majority of the Commons does not support, whose consequences were not spelt out to the British people, and which May, her Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Chancellor Philip Hammond do not — if we take at face value their public pronouncements during the referendum campaign — believe in.

The referendum mandated the government to take Britain out of the EU. That was all. Voters did not say and were not asked whether we wanted to stay in the single-market or customs union. We did not say and were not asked whether EU citizens should be left in fear of being wrenched from their jobs and, in many cases, their new families. Nor did we say we wanted a hard Brexit at the 2015 election. On the contrary, the voters returned a Conservative government whose manifesto declared: ‘We say yes to the -single market.’

May doesn’t care. Like Charles I, she is trying to rule without Parliament. She is-graciously allowing MPs to ask questions about Brexit, but telling them they have no right to decide on the terms of our departure. All that matters is that she has decided, like an absolute monarch, that the referendum was all about immigration. The only way to stop free movement is to abandon the single market and in all probability the customs union too. The know-nothing Tory papers cheer her on with asinine adulation. David Davis, who began his career as a Hampden and is ending it as a Strafford, assures the impotent Commons they need not worry about the plans of their betters because there will be ‘no downside to Brexit at all’.

You only have to look at the plummeting pound, or listen to increasingly frantic business leaders, to suspect those words will haunt Davis to his grave. Somewhere in her mind, Theresa May must sense the coming job losses and fear the naive euphoria cannot last. So she summons the old Tory-alliance of snob and mob to keep a potentially hostile Commons in line.

At the Tory conference she contrasted her plain and honest self with those condescending elite politicians, who look down their well-bred noses at the public’s patriotism and concern about crime and immigration, and cannot understand why 17.4 million voted to leave the EU. Just to rub their dainty noses in the dirt, Amber Rudd proposes that businesses be forced to declare how many foreign workers they employ, like making harlots wear scarlet letters, and Jeremy Hunt warns foreign doctors needlessly cluttering up the NHS that their days in Britain are numbered.

If a few more Poles are beaten up because of their British nationalist postures, who cares? Only liberal elitists whine about the post-Brexit thugfest.

The snob-mob alliance is as old as the Tory party is. In 1780, patriotic Protestants incited the Gordon riots against the Whigs who favoured Catholic emancipation. From Randolph Churchill in 1886 through to F. E. Smith in 1914, Tory leaders incited Ulster Protestants to riot, and at the Curragh, the British army to mutiny to stop the Liberals giving the Irish home rule. In living-memory, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech-incited skinheads to attack Commonwealth immigrants. The snobs’ enemy and the mob’s target have had different names but they are always the same group: Whig aristocrats,-Gladstonian liberals, champagne socialists who in their elite arrogance thought that Catholics should have equal rights and immigrants should be treated with respect.

It has worked before, but I don’t think the alliance will hold this time. Certainly, we once had a liberal elite. But by definition, a true elite is in power. Liberals aren’t in power, a British nationalist elite is, composed of-politicians so disreputable they don’t even believe in the patriotic pap they pump to their cozened followers.

I wish Amber Rudd luck in lecturing others on elitism, when this working-class heroine was not only the ‘aristocracy co-ordinator’ for Four Weddings and a-Funeral, and a director of offshore companies in the Bahamas tax haven, but was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College (although not well enough). In the name of the people, Rudd, like May and Hunt, is now playing with race politics and damning as elitist 16 million voters despite sharing their belief four months ago that we should stay in the EU.

The hypocrisy of the Tory elite will not destroy the alliance. Gullible mobs will always follow hypocritical snobs, but not if they fear they will lose their jobs. That fear is yet to spread to the right of politics, or I would say to the bulk of the population, but you can feel it coming.

All the government’s bombast flows from the relatively quiet economic summer we had after the Brexit vote. Like George W. Bush, when he declared ‘mission accomplished’ after the Americans rolled into Baghdad in 2003, cocksure Tories are full of-unwarranted self-confidence. It will shatter if the pound keeps heading for parity with the euro, and a nation with huge sovereign debts finds that the Treasury’s predictions of the tax take slumping are accurate. If jobs start going, if inflation and the national debt start rising, if the bond markets turn ugly, voters will demand that MPs intervene, and the sensible majority in Parliament will be only too pleased to oblige. May will then learn that, for all our faults, we are a parliamentary democracy, and that politicians who treat parliament like Charles I risk meeting the fate of Charles I.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/theresa-mays-cynical-brexit-stance-has-put-her-head-on-the-block/feed/0Conservative Leader Theresa May Addresses Party ConferencefeaturedCorbyn has won – again. This could be the end of the Labour partyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/this-could-be-the-end-of-the-labour-party/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/this-could-be-the-end-of-the-labour-party/#respondThu, 22 Sep 2016 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9964242Those of us on the left should imagine how our political rivals felt when watching Jeremy Corbyn’s latest victory speech. English…

]]>Those of us on the left should imagine how our political rivals felt when watching Jeremy Corbyn’s latest victory speech. English Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists do not wake at 3 a.m., drenched in sweat, worrying about how they can defeat Jeremy Corbyn. Like a drunk who punches his own face, Corbyn beats himself, leaving Labour’s rivals free to do what they will. For English leftists, however, trying to salvage what they can from the wreckage of their party, the apparently simple question of how to take on the far left appears impossible to answer.

Commentators throw around the ‘far left’ label without stopping to ask what it means. You begin to understand its echoing emptiness when you look around and notice Corbyn has no good writers on his side. In my world of liberal journalism, everyone is saying that when talented journalists decide to support Corbyn, their talent abandons them, and they produce gushing pieces that would embarrass a lovestruck teenager.

The last upsurge of left-wing militancy in the 1970s had Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and other formidable socialist thinkers behind it. Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Danny Blanchflower looked like their successors. They too have produced formidable work on how to make society fairer. They agreed to help Corbyn, but walked away after discovering that Corbynism is just a sloganising personality cult: an attitude, rather than a programme to reform the country. That attitude is banal in content, conspiracist in essence, utopian in aspiration and vicious in practice.

Isabel Hardman and Marcus Roberts discuss the leadership result on Coffee House shots

Paradoxically, it is all the harder to defeat for that. Consider its components, and understand the difficulties facing Labour’s moderates. Conspiracy theory saturates the far left as thoroughly as it saturates the far right. It is its default mode of thought. Its answer to everything. Attention to date has concentrated on Corbyn supporters’ embrace of the Jewish — forgive me, ‘Zionist’ — conspiracy theory.

But anti-Semitic prejudice is only one of dozens of paranoid fantasies that fight for the right to fill tiny minds that want to wish the world away. In one poll, 90 per cent of Corbyn supporters believed that a PR agency organised ‘the coup’ against him. The story comes from a left-wing website called The Canary, which does not pretend to offer its readers evidence. Any disinterested observer can see the ‘coup’ was a vote of no confidence passed by panicked Labour MPs, who thought the Prime Minster might call an early election.

Yet the deceit of a clickbait site, which pays its reporters by how many hits their pieces receive rather than by how much truth they tell, is believed, while the public record is ignored.

Elsewhere, Corbyn’s supporters explain away the terrible opinion polls by saying that they are the bitter fruits of a Tory conspiracy. Not stopping there, they go on to see the invisible hand of MI5 raised against them everywhere from Twitter to the BBC.

You can look at how globalisation, the crash, the fall in real wages, mass immigration and the Iraq war have created a paranoid consciousness across the West. But to understand wilful and self-serving stupidity is not to pardon it. Nor is it to underestimate how hard wilful stupidity is to penetrate. Once hooked, the faithful can find reasons to dismiss any fact that contradicts their ecstatic certainties, and in Trump’s America as much as in Corbyn’s Labour party, there seems no way to get through to them.

Corbyn’s banality, which has driven serious leftists away, is not the unmitigated political disaster it seems either. As with so many who call themselves socialists, it has let him embrace Islamist movements, which are fascist in their political outlook, and Russia’s conservative and kleptomaniac autocracy. This has been my left-wing generation’s greatest betrayal, and its hypocrisy and cynicism is exacting a heavy political price. Yet the banality that allows disgraceful alliances also ensures that the far left does not have to commit to a specific domestic programme.

Utopias are always banal. Corbyn’s Utopia allows his supporters to wallow in the warmth of self-righteousness. They want to end austerity. Stop greed. Bring peace. How they do it is not their concern. Practicalities are dangerous. They take you away from utopia and back into the messy, Blairite realm of compromises and second-bests.

Anyone who knows history knows that utopianism can justify viciousness. By his supporters’ reasoning, leftists who are against Corbyn must be in favour of poverty, greed and war. All tactics are justified in the struggle against such monsters.

Tomorrow’s press will probably be full of articles criticising Smith’s tactics. I hope at least a few have the grace to acknowledge that Smith, Angela Eagle and other Labour MPs have shown moral courage and some physical bravery. The viciousness works. Many in the Labour movement, including several I contacted for this article, are frightened of speaking out against Corbyn. At least Smith and those who stood alongside him would not be silenced.

Corbyn’s victory has proven, too, that the far left’s combination of conspiracy theory, banality, utopianism and viciousness has Labour under its thumb. You glimpse the scale of the disaster that will now follow by looking at how the arguments between Corbyn and his opponents did not even cover the great shifts in opinion that have crippled Labour and other European social democratic parties in the 2010s. Is Labour a patriotic party, for instance? Corbyn will go along with any regime or movement, however right-wing, as long as it is anti-western. But the sleaziness of his behaviour has allowed his opponents to avoid a question that the rise of the SNP should have made unavoidable: can they create a progressive English patriotism?

As the 2015 election and the EU referendum showed, Labour has to find a way of bridging the divide between its liberal middle-class and socially conservative working-class supporters on immigration and multiculturalism. Corbyn’s presence ensured it has not begun to look for a path, let alone find one.

I do not want to believe that the English liberal-left will sit back and allow the Conservatives to rule from 2010 until 2025, or beyond. But under Corbyn, I cannot see how the Labour party goes forward as a credible opposition, let alone a credible government. Perhaps Labour’s day is done, and it is time for something new. Whatever it is, it can hardly be worse.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/this-could-be-the-end-of-the-labour-party/feed/0Pol-24-september_postfeaturedEnemies of historyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/how-the-left-eats-itself-part-iii/
Thu, 28 Jul 2016 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9913932At the start of the 21st century, no one felt the need to reach for studies of ‘third-period’ communism to…

]]>At the start of the 21st century, no one felt the need to reach for studies of ‘third-period’ communism to understand British and American politics. By 2016, I would say that they have become essential.

Admittedly, connoisseurs of the communist movement’s crimes have always thought that 1928 was a vintage year. The Soviet Union had decided that the first period after the glorious Russian revolution of 1917 had been succeeded by a second period, when the West fought back. But now, comrades, yes, now in the historic year of 1928, Stalin had ruled that we were entering a ‘third period’ when capitalism would die in its final crisis. As the Wall Street crash was only months away, this was not as fanciful as it seemed.

The strategy for hastening its fall was suicidal, however. No compromise was possible with anyone who stood in history’s path. Reformists were opportunists and traitors. Social democrats were social fascists; as bad as the Nazi gangs which were already gathering on Berlin streets. Or perhaps worse. For at least the fascists were honest in their way. The parliamentarians and the compromisers were sneaks who had been ‘bribed by the bourgeoisie’ to deceive the masses, as no less an authority than Lenin had said.

When Stalin’s enemy, Leon Trotsky, who was hardly a moderate, warned that instructing left-wingers to fight other left-wingers was a sure way of allowing fascism to ‘ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank’, Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German communist party, denounced him for his ‘criminal counter-revolutionary propaganda’.

The Soviet Union admitted ‘third period’ communism had failed in 1934, for reasons anyone who knows who took power in Germany in 1933 can guess.

That seemed to be that. A warning of the dangers of sectarian delusion, no doubt, but one from so long ago it was of historical interest only.

Not so. And not so long ago. Substitute ‘Blairite’ or ‘neo-liberal’ for ‘social fascist’ or ‘criminal counter-revolutionary’ and a large section of 2016’s Anglo-Saxon left is back in 1928. The red Tories and establishment liberals are as bad as or worse than real Tories or Republicans, they say. The City or Wall Street has bribed them. At this moment of economic and political crisis, they are the true villains, who stand in the way of the people’s victory.

I can see how they got that way, as I have been that way myself. I could write you a book on what is wrong with Hillary Clinton, and did in fact write several books on what was wrong with Tony Blair. What I said was true, I hope. But I cannot deny that it left the worst of my readers with an unwarranted feeling of superiority. They could say that they had seen through the spin. Unlike the manipulated sheeple the establishment herded into polling booths, they were sophisticated enough to know there was no difference between the major parties.

Let us accept that, if you want to shift the consensus, you have to change your own side first. Let us also accept that on most issues, differences between the major parties can be small. In normal times, left- or right-wingers hoping for change can live with their opponents in power for a term or two while they concentrate on moving their party. Live with it, that is, until the times veer away from them, and leave their supposed sophistication in shreds. Like the communists of 1928, they then look at best like history’s fools and at worst like their purported enemy’s accomplices.

I say purported because at the Democratic Convention this week it was not clear that Donald Trump was the left’s enemy. Bernie Sanders told his supporters they had to vote for Hillary Clinton for the compelling reason that his name would not be on the ballot paper. Sanders had every right to complain about his party’s establishment stitching him up, but the truth remained: if his followers did not vote Clinton, they would let in Donald Trump. ‘A bully, a demagogue, a danger to the future of our country’ had to be defeated. ‘This is the real world that we live in.’

Unfortunately, his real world was not the world his supporters lived in. They had believed Sanders when he said Clinton was a Wall Street puppet and were not going to stop believing him just because the danger of a mentally unstable and instinctively authoritarian President Trump entering the White House had forced Sanders to sober up. Clinton’s name produced boos. Trump’s brought shrugs. For them, there remained no difference between the two, and it did not matter who won.

The parallels with Britain are so obvious I feel I am insulting your intelligence by raising them. Just in case your eyes have wandered from the fanatical frenzy that is tearing the Labour party apart, may I point you to the launch of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership in Salford. Corbyn is the Labour movement’s Pontius Pilate. His supporters may engage in sexist, homophobic and racist attacks on Labour MPs. He washes his hands before the multitude and says that he is innocent.

His underlings are not so restrained. Richard Burgon, a podgy solicitor turned Labour MP and tribune of the proletariat, provided the warm-up act, which you can see on YouTube at tinyurl.com/burgon. With the clunking language a 20th-century communist would have recognised, he listed the forces that ‘impede the positive progress of history’. They were the Guardian newspaper and the Labour MPs who would ‘betray’ Corbyn’s supporters and drive them from the party. Burgon barely seemed to have noticed that Britain has had a centre-right government since 2010. It did not occur to him that the disintegration of the Labour party was opening up vistas for the right that stretch into the 2020s.

I cannot imagine Corbyn imitating Bernie Sanders and finding the integrity to argue with his cultish fans. If the courts say he cannot stand as Labour leader, he will not tell them to rally round his successor. If Labour becomes a rump party under his leadership, he will never accept the need to change.

Late in the day, Sanders realised that stopping Trump from becoming the most powerful man on earth mattered after all. His supporters in the convention hall disagreed. Like Corbyn and his activists in Britain, and the Stalinists of 1928, they believed their real enemies were on their side.

Sometimes you can get away with thinking like that. Sometimes not. Ernest Thälmann went along with Stalin’s categorisation of social democrats as ‘social fascists’ until actual fascists came to power in Germany. They taught him the difference by holding him in solitary confinement for 11 years, and putting him before a firing squad in 1944.

Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss The Spectator’s decision to back Brexit:

We British flatter ourselves that common sense is a national personality trait. Giddy Europeans may follow the abstract notions of dangerous leaders, but we could not be more different. We are a practical, moderate breed — if we do say so ourselves — who act according to the evidence, not fantastical theories.

Let me see how this dear delusion is bearing up. It feels as if the Leave campaign will win the EU referendum. But even if Leave loses, it seems certain that it will perform so well as to produce an existential crisis in both our main parties. Our fabled common sense should also tell us that the British economy could have a crisis of its own. We do not need to lose ourselves in arguments about statistics to understand that the likely consequence of exiting the richest single market in the world is that foreign investors will look elsewhere and domestic firms will think of relocating.

Yet millions of Britons believe Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove when they say that all the national and international bodies warning of spending cuts, tax rises, job losses and inflation are not just wrongheaded, but full of corrupt liars bought off with EU gold. Think about what the invective says about those who would determine our future. Even right-wing journalists were alarmed when they heard Vote Leave smear the Institute of Fiscal Studies as a ‘paid-up propaganda arm’ of the EU. They did not have the sense to follow up and ask what right-wing conspiracy theory said about the veracity of the conspiracy theorists.

Our common sense also ought to tell us that ‘there is no magic money tree’. Sensible conservatives have told us so often enough in the past. Yet now, all of a sudden, one of the greatest miracles in natural history has occurred: a magic money tree has appeared from nowhere. If we only vote to leave, its beneficence will ensure that we have tens of billions of pounds to spend on the health service, school buildings, school places, scientific resensible to see a smash-up coming.

There’s another crucial question that cannot be dodged. How can an alliance of Nigel Farage and George Galloway, of Boris Johnson’s opportunism and Michael Gove’s fanaticism, endear itself to millions of allegedly commonsensical Britons?

If the Remain campaign lose, or just squeak home, the press will be full of articles denouncing the feebleness of Jeremy Corbyn and the blunders of David Cameron. In truth, their failings are as nothing when compared with the structural shifts across the West since the 1960s. The old divisions between capital and labour are less able to explain political behaviour with every passing generation. The new divisions are cultural. Labour has already been wiped out in Scotland, where social democracy was no match for nationalism. Whatever the result of the EU referendum, it faces a rebellion in its heartlands from voters who do not believe in universal human rights, internationalism and immigration but in a Britain for the British.

Nearly identical divisions between nationalists and, in this instance, market liberals on the right will tear apart the Tory party. You only have to look at the success of Donald Trump to wonder which side will win. If politics reflected society, we would have a PC left-wing party, a little England right-wing party and a new centre party trying to hold its ground against all comers.

I myself have many problems with liberal culture and its arrant double standards, and appreciate the democratic case for leaving a decaying EU. But I would not vote for our new nationalists. I know hucksters when I see them. When he argued in favour of a representative parliament, Burke warned of the dangers of politicians becoming ‘bidders at an auction of popularity… Flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.’ He forgot to add that the worst fate that could befall political flatterers is to win.

If Brexit triumphs and — contrary to its proponents’ assurances — jobs go, workers’ rights disappear and living standards fall, if our enemies everywhere make their delight clear that Britain has turned its back on the world, if all the promises of a magic money tree turn out to be as fraudulent now as they ever were, right-wing populists will learn what true populist anger looks like. Brexit voters won’t blame themselves. Voters never do. They will blame the politicians and pundits who made them look like fools. Common sense will turn into communal rage as those who have accused everyone else of lying will be revealed as the greatest liars of all.

Will Britain vote to leave the EU? Can the Tories survive the aftermath? Join James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson to discuss at a subscriber-only event at the Royal Institution, Mayfair, on Monday 20 June. Tickets are on sale now. Not a subscriber? Click here to join us, from just £1 a week.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/why-the-leave-campaign-should-pray-they-dont-win/feed/1002Vote Leave Campaigners Deliver Speeches On The Risks Of RemainfeaturedBrexit: The triumph of the right.http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/brexit-triumph-right/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/brexit-triumph-right/#commentsFri, 10 Jun 2016 11:42:40 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9874052The only arguments that matter in politics today are the arguments on the right. The only futures that are possible…

]]>The only arguments that matter in politics today are the arguments on the right. The only futures that are possible to imagine are those offered by the different strands of right-wing thought.

The right’s arguments are not good to my mind. Nor are the futures it offers desirable. It is just that the right’s opponents are all but absent from the debate. The future of the country is up for grabs, but only the right hand of England is reaching up to seize it.

The journalist in me almost hopes that the ‘leave’ campaign wins. The lies it has told will then be clear, and the liberal press will have years of fun tearing into Johnson, Gove and Farage.

They promised a bright economic future, and we will make sure that they are held personally liable for every disruption of trade and fall in tax revenues. They promised extraordinary sums of money for the NHS, to keep the subsidies for farmers, to cut taxes, to cut fuel duty…The paradise the British have always dreamed of : Scandinavian levels of public service and American levels of tax. We will hammer them when their promised paradise never arrives, and make every tax rise and spending cut their responsibility.

They promised that they would end the free movement of European labour, which means that Britain will not be access the single market, which means that we will make sure that every lost job in every exporter will be down to them. They played on the dislike of established immigrants for new arrivals– the least discussed prejudice in multi-cultural societies, by the way – and promised British blacks and Asians that Brexit would allow them to admit their friends and family members from the sub-continent and Caribbean. Naturally, we will take great pleasure in proving the worthlessness of their words once they are in power. Above all, they promised that unravelling Britain from the European Union would be easy. And as that last and greatest lie unravels, in turn, and Britain is bogged down in years of negotiations, we will point out that the Brexiters’ obsessions have stopped us facing the great questions of our day.

The stories will write themselves. If I allow my personal interest to trump the national interest, I can console myself with the thought that a ‘leave’ victory will keep me and my colleagues in work into the 2020s.

However much pleasure we take in exposing the mendacity of Brexit campaign, we will not be able to conceal the fact that the populist right will have won a tremendous victory. I want us to stay primarily because the worst nations and leaders in the world will welcome British withdrawal. But my second reason is that the worst people in Britain will be as delighted. Like the increasingly panicky Labour MPs on the news today, I know a sustained assault on labour rights and environmental protections, and a resurgence of white identity politics, will follow Brexit.

Defending what you have is a sensible political strategy. If I were an American, I would deplore Hillary Clinton’s record but give her presidential campaign my unconditional support. Stopping the catastrophe of a Trump presidency would be my sole political priority.

Stopping the Eurosceptic right in Britain, strikes me as an equally essential defensive manoeuvre. There is no shame in it. In politics, as in so much else, you are lucky if you get half of what you want. Repelling the assaults of your opponents is a sensible strategy. Most of the time it is the only strategy available.

In the case of Britain’s membership of the European Union, however, it is hardly an inspiring or even honourable strategy. Labour politicians and their supporters are saying, in effect, ‘we know we cannot win an election, therefore we must rely on the European Union to defend the rights we cannot protect in a free democratic contest.’

It feels like a football fan recommending match fixing.

If ‘remain’ wins, meanwhile, there will be scant consolation for the liberal-left, either. It will be a victory for David Cameron. He and George Osborne have carried the weight of this campaign, and they have done it for traditional conservative reasons: to protect our economic order and national security. If they win, their version of right-wing politics will have triumphed.

This is hardly an enticing prospect for a left that sees itself as committed to radical change and the power of dissent, but is in truth is no threat to anyone. It is a measure of left-wing failure that the most successful ‘dissenters’ in recent history have not been the radicals, celebrated in pat little tributes Radio 4 and the radical press, but the line of genuine insurgents, which began in the 1990s with James Goldsmith, and went on through the Tory Eurosceptics, who wrecked the Major administration, through to Johnson, Farage and Gove today.

Even if they fail, they will have come within an inch of provoking an economic, diplomatic and constitutional crisis beyond the dreams of the radical left.

In short, the Daily Mail and Telegraph have presented a far greater threat to the established order than the Morning Star and Guardian. They are giving Russia what it wants, and threatening the profitability of big business and the City.

It is too easy to blame the appalling leadership of Jeremy Corbyn for the left’s current irrelevance. It may be the case that Corbyn no more believes in his heart that Britain should stay in the EU than Boris Johnson believes in his that Britain should leave. It is certainly the case that whatever his true beliefs Corbyn is a sectarian politician who lacks the essential ability of any successful leader to appeal beyond his cult.

But there is a far deeper problem that Corbyn’s removal will not solve. To simplify wildly the main current in liberal-left thought is universalist. We believe that rights are for everyone. Logically we are committed to the position that a new immigrant to Britain, for instance, should be as entitled to benefits and public services a British citizen born and bred here. Large chunks of the British electorate could not disagree more. They are communitarians. They believe that natives should have greater rights; that you have to belong before you can receive.

The populist right can thus pose as the patriotic friends of the masses. That they are lying, ought to go without saying. It will be the working and middle classes, who will suffer most from a post-Brexit recession. It will be poor and cowered workers, who will lose what limited employment, holiday and maternity protections they enjoy. I wish Labour had a leadership capable of saying so clearly, rather than standing by while the hard right runs riot.

But even if it did, the fact remains that until the liberal-left finds a way of showing it understands nationalist resentments, it will lose. At present, that task seems wholly beyond it, and England in particular is in danger of going the way of so many continental countries where the only choice that matters is between the xenophobic right and the neo-liberal right.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/brexit-triumph-right/feed/1How to save Labourhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/what-labour-needs-now-is-a-takeover-by-real-left-wing-radicals/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/what-labour-needs-now-is-a-takeover-by-real-left-wing-radicals/#commentsThu, 05 May 2016 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9837622To say that the Labour party is in crisis because it is ‘too left-wing’ is to miss the point spectacularly.…

]]>To say that the Labour party is in crisis because it is ‘too left-wing’ is to miss the point spectacularly. With eyes wide open, and all democratic procedures punctiliously observed, its members have chosen in their tens of thousands to endorse not ‘the left’, but an ugly simulacrum of left-wing politics.

They have gone along with the type of left-winger who flourished in the long boom between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great recession. The hypocrite who damns oppression, but only if it is committed by western countries. The pseudo-egalitarian who will condemn sexism and homophobia, but not the prejudices of favoured regimes and minorities. The fake anti-racist who will attack the ‘far right’ while echoing the fascist conspiracy theory.

Let us see how their ‘new politics’ are progressing. At the time of going to press, and we accept that this is a provisional tally, Labour has had to suspend Ken Livingstone for invoking Adolf Hitler in the latest of his many attempts to bait and humiliate Jews. Also suspended is Naz Shah, one of its two Bradford MPs, for saying that Israelis should be transported to America. Hanging alongside them on Labour’s drooping dirty-laundry line are a good half-dozen Muslim Labour councillors, suspended for saying that Jews were really behind Islamic State, or for echoing Shah’s call for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews, or for telling Israeli footballers that their country was the new Third Reich.

Cynics dismiss the fuss. There are 2.7 million Muslims and only 260,000 Jews in Britain. If left-wingers alienate Jews, the profit-and-loss account is still in the black, particularly when a large segment of the white bourgeois left is as keen on laying into ‘the Zionists’, as they so daintily call them. It is not true to say all British Muslims want fevered rhetoric against Jews (any more than it is to say that all Jews oppose Corbyn). But in areas with large Muslim minorities, even the Liberal Democrats have played the race card. If Labour doesn’t join them, it will be beaten by them. That’s the ‘new politics’ and we had better get used to it.

In any case, they continue, Labour is more like Ukip than the BNP. It doesn’t defend its Livingstones and Shahs but suspends them, while ducking questions from reporters who wonder why they were attracted to Labour in the first place.

To me, there is every reason to make a fuss. Labour’s Jewish question is a symptom of a wider sickness in the party, which will discredit both it and left-wing culture if left unchecked. That culture’s huge and not wholly unwarranted advantage relies on the assumption that leftists are good people. The left did not invade Iraq, it did not crash the banking system, it did not impose the bedroom tax, or ransack company pension schemes and head off to Monaco. Even when the left was wrong, it was in the 1066 and All That formulation ‘wrong but wromantic’. The Tories, even in their fleeting moments of competence, which occur ever more rarely these days, could only ever be ‘right but repulsive’.

‘The left’ can get away with the assumption of romantic virtue because it has been on the sidelines. Who cared what it did or said? Now Corbyn leads the opposition and all its failings are on display.

The ‘left’, you might have thought, is against the far right. ‘Racist’ and ‘fascist’ are the insults leftists throw against everyone from their stuffy parents to members of the parliamentary Conservative party. Yet it is normal now to hear the fascist conspiracy theory fall from the lips of a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn or a supporter of Marine Le Pen.

Supporters? What am I saying? Corbyn himself is happy to endorse the most disgraceful liars. Corbyn decided that an Arab deported for saying that Jews feasted on the blood of Christian children was a victim of the ‘pro-Israel lobby’. He opined that the church was doing the Zionists’ dirty work when it disciplined an Anglican vicar, from Haslemere of all places, who cited Holocaust deniers and said 9/11 was the fault of the…oh go on, guess. Polite political commentators say that I must add at this point that ‘Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite’. Sorry to be a fact-checking bore, but if he isn’t a racist, then he is a remarkably stupid old man who in George Orwell’s phrase is ‘playing with fire without knowing fire is hot’.

If Labour is ever to win again, the poison from the far left will have to drained. And not just because Corbyn will keep the right in power indefinitely. Nothing will truly change unless there is a change of mind as well as a change of tactics. Those capable of self-criticism should at least consider that the prejudices they have endorsed may have been immoral. They should, but probably won’t. I can guess their reply. They will say: ‘We have not endorsed racism, we have just engaged in legitimate opposition to Israel.’

I could go on about how the supposed supporters of the Palestinians on the left do not appear to understand that Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘friends’ in Hamas and Hezbollah oppress Arabs as much as Jews. I could add that a left that cannot oppose clerical tyrants is no longer a force for progress in the world. But let us move away from the blood- and God-soaked ‘Holy Land’, and consider how, as a matter of course, the faction of the left in charge of the Labour party appears on the propaganda channels of Iran and Russia, and how it sides with Islamist conservatives against Muslim liberals.

The political consequence of these shameful double standards will be enormous. Not only is the Corbyn left comfortable with regimes that all decent liberals and leftists have a duty to oppose. It is comfortable with regimes that mean Britain harm. Patriotism may be an embarrassing subject today and no one talks of ‘traitors aiding the enemy’, but this does not mean that the patriotic impulse has died. The British public will still notice that the leaders of the opposition are more comfortable with hostile foreign countries than their own country, and the majority of their own countrymen and women too.

In France it is automatic for respectable politicians to condemn racism and then add ‘and anti-Semitism’. Perhaps anti-Semitism is not taken as seriously here because the Nazis stopped at the Channel and we never had to live through our own version of Vichy. But there is a more contemporary reason for the failure to tackle it, or even admit its existence, that could unravel social-democratic politics.

Most Jews are white. And across the middle-class left, it is held that racism is not racism when it is directed against whites in general and that entitled aristocrat of our age, the straight white male, in particular. The dangers for centre-left parties should be obvious. In Europe and in Donald Trump’s America, the white-working-class base of social-democratic parties is falling away. Voters will carry on leaving if they keep hearing expensively educated voices tell them in perfectly constructed sentences that they are the oppressors who must be overthrown. Why should a white man with miserable job and no prospects tolerate a left-wing elite that casts him as an overprivileged villain? If I were in his shoes, I would loathe the lies and point-scoring and want nothing to do with such politicians.

A ‘left-wing’ egalitarianism that takes so little notice of class is fake. Like a ‘left-wing’ foreign policy that is on the side of the reactionary and obscurantist, it will first infuriate and then fail.

The tragedy for Britain is that a dose of true left-wing radicalism is needed now. Only the most complacent Tories maintain that our economic order should continue unreformed. Simon Wren-Lewis, Chris Dillow and other left-wing economists whom I have always respected say there is a good case for many of John McDonnell’s economic policies. An entrepreneurial state that supports start-ups through a government investment bank is a sensible way of dealing with the manifold failings of the banking system to promote new business. Left-wing warnings against the government’s combination of austerity with close-to-zero interest rates are wholly justified. When the next shock comes, the supposedly prudent Osborne will have left this country naked before the storm without one monetary lever to pull.

Like a case of dysentery, the Corbyn moment will pass. My fear is that it will be replaced not with a serious commitment to reform, but with the terrified conformism that characterised the Labour party after Tony Blair became leader. Labour will be so desperate to prove it is strong on national security that it will agree with whatever the generals and security services propose. It will be so desperate to appear economically reputable that it will endorse rather than oppose the stagnant system the Cameron government has presided over.

The most haunting line about politics I know comes from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. While he lay in one of Mussolini’s jails, he wrote ‘The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’

Corbynism is a morbid symptom — the curse my generation of left-wingers have handed to on to our children, who deserved a better and more principled politics. In all likelihood, when the interregnum is over, we will return to normality, even though normality is the last thing Britain needs.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/what-labour-needs-now-is-a-takeover-by-real-left-wing-radicals/feed/304Candidates Participate In The London Gay Mayoral HustingsfeaturedMeet the ‘out’ campaign’s secret weapon: Jeremy Corbynhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/jeremy-corbyn-is-the-out-campaigns-secret-weapon/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/jeremy-corbyn-is-the-out-campaigns-secret-weapon/#commentsThu, 25 Feb 2016 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9771482Europe has opened up an unbridgeable chasm in the Conservative party. Labour remains, near as dammit, united. On the EU…

]]>Europe has opened up an unbridgeable chasm in the Conservative party. Labour remains, near as dammit, united. On the EU referendum, an opposition accustomed to defeat has a rare chance of victory.

Yet when Jeremy Corbyn makes the case for staying in he speaks without conviction. Like a man called into work on his day off, his weary expression and dispirited voice tell you he would rather be somewhere else. Tory MPs, so divided that it is hard to see how they can stay in the same party, unite in laughing at him.

The Labour leadership and most of the unions seem unaware that this is a fight over the future of Britain. Their strange indifference may help the opponents of the EU prevail.

The ‘out’ campaign offers a simple explanation for the left’s lethargy: in their hearts Corbyn, Unite and the rest do not want us to stay in the EU. As one Vote Leave spokesman said, ‘It’s extremely sad to see that Jeremy, who is for all his faults a conviction politician and a lifelong opponent of the EU, has been gagged by the clapped-out Blairites rejected in the Labour leadership contest.’

But Vote Leave fails to understand the Labour party as it fails to understand so much else. It is not that Corbyn secretly wants Britain to withdraw from the EU. It is that he all too obviously does not care about it.

When Corbyn asked moderate Labour politicians to serve in his shadow cabinet, many found the idea of working for him repugnant. Those who agreed — for the good of the party — insisted that Corbyn commit to campaign to keep Britain in Europe.

‘It was like pinning jelly to a wall,’ one told me. ‘I kept telling him, “It’s a yes or no choice, Jeremy, in or out. There is no ‘maybe’ or ‘Only if the EU does what I want’ on the ballot paper.” He kept wandering away from the subject, and I kept having to drag him back.’

You must take a crash course in the biases of the far left to understand its sins of omission and commission. David Cameron got close to the truth when, in a voice full of fake pity, he told that Corbyn his pro-EU stance may cause his allies to accuse him of ‘being a member of an establishment’. Just so. The far left calls all who deviate from its sacred texts ‘red Tories’, ‘Blairite-Tories’, ‘Tory-lites’ or even — brace yourselves — ‘Tories’. Treason, a charge Corbynistas have thrown at so many others, will be thrown back at them.

In foreign affairs, this commitment–phobia explains the willingness to go along with any anti-western movement, however racist, sexist or genocidal it might be, which has disgraced my generation of leftists as surely as support for Stalin disgraced left-wingers in the 1930s.

In domestic policy, however, the instinct to find fault with those who say, for instance, that Britain’s justice system is the best in the world, or that our future can only be in the European Union, is not a bad reflex. Without the urge to unravel such complacency, faults are never exposed and reform is never attempted.

But such a tendency can easily develop into nervous tics and then compulsive disorders. If left-wingers and union leaders could bring themselves to think strategically, they would be scared out of their skins by the prospect of Britain withdrawing from the EU. ‘Splendid isolation’ would be anything but splendid for them. The Tories would oust Cameron and his replacement would be even more right-wing. The social and economic protection provided by EU membership would vanish.

Yet the left cannot bring itself to campaign wholeheartedly for Britain to stay in. For that would mean accepting that the EU had values worth defending — despite its disgraceful treatment of southern Europe and its attempts to promote a free-trade area, from which left-wingers instinctively recoil. And so Unite spends most of its time worrying that the mooted free-trade agreement between the EU and the US will lead to the privatisation of the NHS. And Frances O’Grady, the current TUC general secretary, does not share the enthusiasm for the EU of her predecessors.

In Labour circles, the conventional view is that the far left’s commitment-phobia does not matter. Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn are leading the Labour campaign for ‘in’ and they are politicians with open minds, skilful in debate, who can secure the Labour vote.

I am not so sure. Corbyn may be an electoral disaster waiting to happen but he has the support of the two or three million people in Britain who define themselves as leftists. Their votes will matter, and if the EU referendum doesn’t bother their leader, they may wonder why they should bother to vote at all.

The trade unions may not be what they were, but they can still run an effective campaign. Yet with a few exceptions, they are refusing to think strategically. How can they? If the unions and the wider left were to think strategically, they would have to accept that the leaders they have helped to impose on the Labour party — first Miliband and now Corbyn — have benefited no one except the Conservatives.

They would have to accept that they should remove Corbyn from office before he loses Labour another election. They would have to accept, in short, that the willingness to compromise is not the same as the desire to sell out. And this they show no signs of doing.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/jeremy-corbyn-is-the-out-campaigns-secret-weapon/feed/25Jeremy Corbyn Visits The North EastfeaturedThe Corbyn crack-uphttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/life-inside-jeremy-corbyns-crazy-party/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/life-inside-jeremy-corbyns-crazy-party/#commentsThu, 03 Dec 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9700672Jeremy Corbyn is a rarity among politicians. All his enemies are on his own side. For the Tories, Ukip and…

]]>Jeremy Corbyn is a rarity among politicians. All his enemies are on his own side. For the Tories, Ukip and the SNP, Corbyn is a dream made real. They could not love him more. As the riotous scenes at the shadow cabinet and parliamentary Labour party meetings this week showed, his colleagues see Corbyn and John McDonnell as modern Leninists who are mobilising their cadres to purge all dissidents from the party.

Conversations with Corbyn’s aides show a gentler side to the new regime, however. They suggest the Corbynistas are unlikely to be able to control Labour MPs when they can barely control themselves.

‘Chaos’ was the word that came up most often, followed by ‘panic’ and ‘unforced errors’. Corbyn’s staffers were working 12-hour days. As tiredness and hysteria built, rows broke out, voices were raised and accusations of bullying followed. So tense is the mood that John McDonnell’s supporters suggested that Corbyn’s staff do what all oppressed workers of the world should do: join a trade union and force the hated boss class to heed their justified grievances.

It is no wonder his aides are jittery. They have had to build a party leader from scratch. Take the image which ‘Jeremy’ — as every-one insists on calling him — presents to the public. Even his closest friends had to admit that his ‘FE lecturer at the Primark sale’ was not perhaps the style a man aiming to be prime minister should ape.

After much time and argument, they found a stylist he would agree to listen to. The stylist’s suggestions were practical. Jeremy’s trousers were too long. Folds of cloth concertinaed up on top of his shoes, making him look as if he were wearing another man’s clothes. Jeremy should perhaps consider buying trousers with a ‘small’ or ‘regular’ leg, the stylist said, as the ‘long’ leg was, well, too long for him. He was to stop wearing striped shirts, which do not look good on television, and dress in plain colours.

Corbyn attempted to fight back. His son had to be sent from Westminster to his home in Finsbury Park after Corbyn failed to bring a suit in for Prime Minister’s Questions. But he buckled down and buckled up, particularly after the stylist told him that there were no sartorial objections to him wearing a red tie.

The political objections may be less easy to dismiss. Voters have described for decades how they hated focus-group-tested, poll-watching professional politicians. The voters are a pack of liars. Corbyn offered them an alternative, and they have no time for that either. When Corbyn said he was ‘not happy’ with the police or security services operating a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy in the event of a terror attack, he had not ‘war-gamed’ his comments in advance with his advisers. The first they knew about them was when they turned on the news. None of John McDonnell’s staff knew that he was going to throw a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book across the chamber of the House of Commons. It was the shadow chancellor’s own little joke.

Nor do the Corbynite apparatchiks appear to be directing the new generation of militants who are rampaging through constituency parties. No Labour advisers could explain to me why their supporters were targeting popular MPs such as Stella Creasy. She’s one of Westminster most interesting feminist voices, I said. She made the life of the poor and working class better when she helped force the Tories to regulate the payday loan sharks. Why are they going for her?

‘We don’t know,’ they replied. ‘It’s nothing to do with us.’

If this is Leninism, it is Leninism for the Twitter age. Militants whose contribution to the cause of social justice has been to shriek on social media and call total strangers ‘Tory scum’ will persecute any MP to the right of Corbyn and McDonnell, without asking the leadership’s permission or needing its instructions. They just know instinctively that the overwhelming majority of the parliamentary party fails to meet Jeremy’s high standards, and so has to go.

As indeed do the overwhelming majority of the British people. Even Corbyn and McDonnell worry that the killer charge that Labour loves Britain’s enemies more than it loves Britain may resonate with the British electorate. They are preparing a string of admirable initiatives to show that they care about security. The Labour leadership will launch a national campaign to protect the interests of sick veterans back from war. It proposes to highlight new ways of protecting women from rape, and of protecting Parliament itself from terrorist attack.

All worthy proposals, as I said. And all useless, as Corbyn’s aides know. When I asked one what vote she expected her new model Labour party would get at a general election, she said it would be as low as 20 or even 15 per cent.

Her well-grounded despair at what Corbyn is doing to Labour raises Lenin’s old question: ‘What is to be done?’ Corbyn ought to step down for the good of the Labour party and the wider left. His leadership may give the Conservatives a generation in power, and turn Ukip into a serious political force. But the far left that Corbyn comes from does not regard politicians from the Labour mainstream as comrades. In Corbyn’s world they are Blairite hypocrites and traitors, worse even than the Tories, because they sell out the interests of the workers they are meant to champion. I cannot see Corbyn responding to an appeal that he has a comradely duty to put first the interests of a Labour party he despises.

There may be another pressure, however. My conversations have confirmed what we already knew. Whatever his politics, Corbyn is unfit to lead a political party. He cannot cope with the enormous pressure or the relentless scrutiny. One figure close to the leadership said I should not discount the possibility that the strain would become too much for him and that he would step down — as much for the sake of his own health as the health of the Labour party.

Listen

Before the bodies in Paris’s restaurants were cold, Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop the War Coalition knew who the real villains were — and they were not the Islamists who massacred civilians. ‘Paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in Middle East’ ran a headline on its site. The article went on to say that the consequence of the West’s ‘decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention’.

This flawless example of what I once called the ‘kill us, we deserve it’ school of political analysis takes us to the heart of Corbyn’s beliefs. Even his opponents have yet to appreciate the malign double standards of the new Labour party, though they ought to be clear for all to see by now.

Whatever its protestations, Corbyn’s far left is not anti-war. Pacifism may not be a moral position in all circumstances but, in my view at least, it remains an honourable belief, rooted in Christian teaching. Corbyn does not share it. He does not oppose violence wherever it comes from, as the BBC’s political editor claimed this week. When anti-western regimes and movements go to war, his language turns slippery. Corbyn never quite has the guts to support the violence of others, but he excuses it like a gangster’s lawyer trying to get a crime boss off on a technicality.

He defended the Russian invasion of Ukraine by saying the West had provoked the Kremlin. His spin-doctor, Seumas Milne of the Guardian, the nearest thing you can find to a Stalinist in the 21st century, joined the leaders of Europe’s far-right parties at Putin’s propaganda summits. Meanwhile Corbyn and John McDonnell have defended the IRA, Hezbollah and Hamas. Like many on the far left (and right), they are pro-Assad. So committed to Syrian Ba’athism are Stop the War that they tried to stop Syrian refugees from Assad’s terror speaking at their meetings.

You cannot describe a far left that can overlook Assad’s atrocities as pacifist. Nor can you call its members little Englanders. True isolationists think we have no business wasting our blood and treasure in other people’s conflicts — a view I suspect the majority of the British share. They do not want to call radical Islamists, Assad, or Putin their ‘friends’ and take up their grievances. They hope, vainly I fear, that we can ignore them.

Corbyn, along with too much of ‘progressive opinion’, has a mistrust bordering on hatred for western powers. They do not just condemn the West for its crimes, which are frequent enough. They are ‘Occidentalists’, to use the jargon: people who see the West as the ‘root cause’ of all evil.

Their ideology is in turn genuinely rootless. They have no feeling for the best traditions of their country, and their commitments to the victims of foreign oppression are shallow and insincere. They rightly condemn western support for Saudi Arabia. But if the Saudis were to become the West’s enemy tomorrow, their opposition would vanish like dew in the morning sun.

These double standards were once a problem for those of us who thought the British left deserved better. Now that we have learned from Corbyn’s landslide victory that the British left neither deserve nor want better, they are everyone else’s problem too.

Stop the War revealed the devious inability of the new left to stick by what they mean. As soon as they realised that outsiders were reading the site, they removed the offending article. Corbyn was as shifty. On Monday, Labour MPs implored him to reject the idea that an attack on Parisians by a fascistic Islamist movement was the West’s fault. He ducked into woozy bureaucratic language and said Stop the War’s argument was ‘inappropriate’. He refused to condemn it, however. How could he when he would be rejecting everything he believed for 40 years?

Those who want to see the far left for what it is should be able to detect a pattern in his statements by now. Corbyn’s response to the Paris killings was to join with other apparently moral voices and denounce the media for not giving equal space to atrocities ‘outside Europe’. You do not understand Corbyn if you reply, as Helen Lewis of the New Statesman did, that ‘the media is full of foreign news that barely gets read’ — telling though her putdown was. Nor is it enough to go further and say that Corbyn does not want foreign news that contradicts his Manichean worldview.

Conspiracy theories certainly riddle his far left, who dismiss reports of inconvenient war crimes as lies by corporate media designed to brainwash the masses into supporting western imperialism. The reality, however, is worse than a mere blocking out of unpleasant truths. Corbyn and his supporters do not want us to think about Paris because they cannot accept that privileged westerners can be victims. If Isis kills them, it is their own or their governments’ fault. All you should do is mutter ‘blowback’ and turn off the news.

Understand that the far left believe that only favoured groups can be victims, and you understand the growth of left-wing anti-Semitism, the indifference to demands for women’s equality in rich countries, as well as the ease with which they dismiss bodies on Parisian streets. Privileged whites are the problem. We should shed no tears for them.

Corbyn’s inability to state his true beliefs defines his leadership of the Labour party. To take the most brazen instance, he condemned the assassination of Mohammed ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazi by saying it would have been better if he had been brought before a court. So it would. But Corbyn would not have supported sending special forces to Syria to kidnap Emwazi and bring him to trial. He does not believe in deploying the armed forces. Indeed he is ‘not happy’ with police shooting to kill terrorists murdering British citizens on British streets. His apparently moral stance was built on an outright lie.

A chorus of approval from ignorant cliché-mongers accompanied Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour’s leader. He was authentic. He was not afraid to say what he thought. He was not the creation of focus groups and media manipulators, but an honest man making a new politics.

Every claim they made was false. Jeremy Corbyn and the left he comes from cannot campaign for office by saying what they really think or they would horrify the bulk of the population. They say enough to keep their ‘base’ happy, and then dodge and twist when they speak to the rest of us. Far from being authentic, Jeremy Corbyn is one of the most dishonest politicians you will see in your lifetime.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/jeremy-corbyn-isnt-anti-war-hes-just-anti-west/feed/413CorbynfeaturedConverting the Corbyn culthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/how-does-labour-solve-a-problem-like-jeremy-corbyn/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/how-does-labour-solve-a-problem-like-jeremy-corbyn/#commentsThu, 29 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9671432If Labour is ever to clamber out of its cage on the fringe of politics, it will have to convince…

]]>If Labour is ever to clamber out of its cage on the fringe of politics, it will have to convince the 250,000 supporters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn to turn from far-leftists into social democrats. The necessity of persuading them that they made a terrible mistake is so obvious to Labour MPs that they barely need to talk about it.

In case it is not obvious to you, let me spell it out. Corbyn exacerbates every fault that kept Labour from power in 2015, and then adds some new ones, just for fun. To the failure to convince the voters that Labour can be trusted with control of the borders and the management of public money and the economy, Corbyn and his comrades bring their support for the nationalist and imperialist Putin regime, the theocratic Iranian regime, and the women-, Jew- and gay- haters of radical Islam. Corbyn’s Labour will ask a Britain it seems to despise to give it power. Britain will never do so, and every Labour politician I have spoken to accepts that the Labour party will have to destroy Corbyn before Corbyn destroys the Labour party.

A palace coup is not impossible. The party conference has to endorse Labour’s leader annually. In normal times, the endorsement is a formality. These are not normal times, however, and if the parliamentary party puts forward just one candidate, and refuses to nominate Corbyn or a supporter of Corbyn, the members would have to accept the replacement.

Tony Blair’s former adviser John McTernan has been arguing for weeks that MPs should put the interests of Labour voters before Labour members and dump Corbyn in 2016. The left would go wild; Labour members would scream that MPs were backstabbing bastards who had overridden party democracy. But so what? Politicians are meant to be backstabbing bastards. There are moments of crisis when their party and their country’s interests demand backstabbing bastards. If today’s Labour MPs can’t bring themselves to be backstabbing bastards, they should step aside and make way for proper politicians who can.

Although the McTernan plan is feasible, it raises formidable difficulties. Corbyn and his supporters would call in the lawyers. They would argue that, as leader, Corbyn’s name should be on the ballot paper however few MPs nominated him. No Labour MP I have spoken to wants to take on that fight — not for now, at any rate. Instead, they want to persuade Corbyn’s supporters that he has to go.

The long-term nature of that argument accounts for much of the paranoia in the Labour party. The far left knows that nine out of ten of Corbyn’s colleagues want him out. MPs know that the far left wants to deselect and replace them. In the middle of these manoeuvres sits the puzzled figure of Corbyn himself. Shadow cabinet members tell me that he isn’t a bullying leader. On the contrary, he treats their objections to his policies politely, and lets them follow their consciences. Such is the tension in the Labour party that MPs regard Corbyn’s virtues as a vice and his tolerance as weakness. They say he lacks the authority to stop Momentum, Socialist Organiser, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the rest of the far left coming for sitting MPs, even if he wants to.

Corbyn supporters’ screams of ‘Tory!’ at all who disagree with them — their gobbiness and on occasion their gobbing too — suggest it is delusional for Labour MPs to hope that one day they will agree to abandon their hero. On the left at the moment, if you don’t accept Corbyn’s intrinsic goodness and dismiss reports of his alliances with the Russian nationalist right and Islamist religious right as ‘smears’, then you are making a public declaration of your own wickedness.

‘I’m a very low-rung academic in the humanities, and I have learnt the art of holding my tongue 24 hours a day,’ writes a correspondent reporting in from the core Corbyn heartland of higher education. ‘It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers here. If I could get out of academia, I would. It’s almost as if they prefer having Tories to shout at than a Labour government to be disappointed in.’

Cultists who damn doubters as not just wrong but wicked are not easily persuaded to change, particularly when beneath the hypocrisy, the utopianism, the posturing and the sickly indulgence of secular and religious tyranny, they have a decent argument. The 2008 banking crash led to the punishment of working- and middle-class people who were not responsible for it. We now have a Conservative government intent on pushing the ‘striving’ poor it purports to support into penury. Surely it is not ‘far left’ to see the immorality in that, and not utopian to believe that a populist political movement can be built to fight it?

Herein lies the Labour membership’s problem, and Labour MPs’ slim hope. The careers of Corbyn and his advisers have been dominated by opposition to Anglo-American wars, and support for the IRA, Chavista Venezuela, Iran, radical Islam and every Russian dictator from Brezhnev to Putin. They have not been interested in domestic politics, and have no idea how to change it.

Corbyn’s shadow chancellor supported George Osborne’s fiscal responsibility charter, only to U-turn when the poor fool finally realised it would stop him opposing austerity. The strongest stand against the government’s cut to tax credits has not come from Corbyn’s supposedly left-wing Labour, but from the supposedly compromised Liberal Democrats.

Several shadow ministers told me that Corbyn’s support would shrink as members realised that he was hopeless at opposing the government. In the long run, his own incompetence would do for him, they said.

Whether Labour has the luxury of waiting years for its members to realise that Corbyn is not the fighter they thought him to be was not a question they either posed or answered. In the long run we are all dead, said Lord Keynes. For Labour, it may be sooner than that.

]]>In the grounds of Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University stands a one-tonne sculpture. Roughly hewn and about five feet high, it carries in its top corner an ill-carved sun. Beneath it are some words of Alex Salmond, half-sunk in the sandstone, as if they were the thoughts of a Scottish Ozymandias:

‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.’

This clunky celebration of SNP -policy should raise a few doubts. Free higher education is not free for all in Scotland. Edinburgh can afford to pay the fees of only 124,000 students in Scottish universities. Their contemporaries might have the grades, but they must go elsewhere because Scottish universities need fee-payers from England and Wales to balance their books. More pertinently, the Heriot-Watt stone ignores the class warfare in Scottish education. To fund free university education for largely middle-class students, the SNP has hit the budgets of the further education colleges of the working class.

But the biggest question is the most basic: what the hell is a university doing plonking a lump of rock covered with party political propaganda on its campus?

Scottish universities are meant to be independent, but the SNP will not allow them to stay that way, for a reason that lies at the root of its political success and wider failure.

On the one hand, it is the best election-winning machine in Britain. It has majority control of a Scottish parliament, and possesses nearly every Scottish Westminster constituency. Its opinion-poll ratings are so high that Scotland can seem a one-party state. For all that, the SNP lost the independence referendum, the one vote it had to win to justify its existence. If it is to win next time, if indeed there is to be a next time, the SNP has to achieve what we old Marxists call ‘hegemony’: the cultural as well as the political domination of Scottish society.

To achieve hegemony, ‘opinion formers’ must assure the public that independence is the only way forward. Nationalism must become the common sense of Scottish life. If the opinion formers lack the required enthusiasm, the SNP must persuade them to think twice before speaking out.

Nationalists are not planning anything as vulgar or blatant as the march on the BBC during the referendum campaign or the abolition of academic freedom. Instead, they are quietly proposing to bring universities into line by nationalising them.

At the last minute, the SNP has slipped three clauses into the Higher -Education Governance Bill currently before the Scot-tish parliament. They give ministers the power to use secondary legislation to impose unspecified conditions on universities without consultation. Universities Scotland, which represents the principals and directors of Scotland’s higher education institutions, says that it fears the ‘control’ the SNP is amassing will lead to the Office of National Statistics reclassifying universities as ‘public’ rather than independent bodies.

This is not a mere slip of the bureaucrat’s pen. Public bodies cannot budget for deficits. They need the approval of government for major projects. In short, Scottish universities will be under SNP rule.

The SNP does not say as much. It has secured the services of one Ferdinand von Prondzynski, vice-chancellor of Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University and an academic politician who combines the most striking traits of Uriah Heep and Kenneth Widmer-pool. ‘Von Pron’, as he is called without affection by his colleagues, tells anyone who cares to listen that his family was originally of Pomeranian-Kashubian origins and can be traced back to the 14th century. Born in Germany and raised in Ireland, he was a professor of law at Hull University, moved on to Dublin City University, and finally settled in Scotland. He held up a finger to test the wind direction when he arrived in his new homeland and decided to be the SNP’s main man in the Scottish academe.

His fellow professors weren’t bad sorts, he concluded. Many were ‘genuinely intellectual and clever’. But university life had made them conservative. ‘Universities and the Catholic church are the only institutions that have survived intact since the Middle Ages,’ he declared, and it was time to put a stop to all that fuddy-duddy nonsense. University governing bodies must be democratised by having elected chairs and trade union representatives.

It sounds terribly liberal until you learn that universities already have staff representatives. The SNP proposes to grant favours to trade unions because it wants to detach them from the Labour party and increase its hegemonic control. As for elected chairs, the SNP can reasonably calculate that, given its electoral dominance, the winning candidates are likely to be sympathisers, or at the very least will deem it politic to pretend to be sympathisers.

Principals and vice-chancellors are frightened of making public criticisms. They say that Scottish civil servants and no less a figure than Von Pron himself have warned that objections to the bill must be handled carefully. On condition of anonymity, one told me that the superficially democratic argument came down to a question of power: ‘If you are a nationalist government with only one political ambition — independence — centralisation of power is a clear policy focus, and getting control of your university sector is an early priority.’

Don’t think the SNP won’t use its power. During the referendum campaign Louise Richardson, principal of St Andrews University, warned that it would be ‘catastrophic’ for the universities if a ‘yes’ vote cut them off from the research centres of the rest of Britain. The SNP bombarded her with emails demanding that she praise the Scottish government and tone down her criticisms. One astonished observer told the press, ‘She is the principal of an independent Scottish institution. You don’t expect the First Minister of Scotland to call up and try and put words in her mouth.’

The way the wind is blowing in Scotland, you will see more SNP politicians putting more words in the mouths of formerly independent academics, and more sculptures celebrating the glory of their achievements when they have done it.

Listen

‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for the reactionary neocons they really are,’ a Guardian commenter told its columnist Rafael Behr after he had criticised Corbyn.

Not that they are careful about anything, or that they will take advice from me, but the left should be careful of what it wishes for. Its accusations won’t seem ridiculous soon. The one prophesy I can make with certainty amid today’s chaos is that many on the left will head for the right. When they arrive, they will be greeted with bogus explanations for their ‘betrayal’.

Conservatives will talk as if there is a right-wing gene which, like male-pattern baldness, manifests itself with age. The US leftist-turned-neocon Irving Kristol set the pattern for the pattern-baldness theory of politics when he opined that a conservative is a liberal who has been ‘mugged by reality’. He did not understand that the effects of reality’s many muggings are never predictable, or that facts of life are not always, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, conservative. If they were, we would still have feudalism.

The standard explanation from left-wingers is equally self-serving. Turncoats are like prostitutes, they say, who sell their virtue for money. They are pure; those who disagree with them are corrupt; and that is all there is to it.

Owen Jones, who seems to have abandoned journalism to become Jeremy Corbyn’s PR man, offers an equally thoughtless argument. ‘Swimming against a strong tide is exhausting,’ he sighed recently. Leftists who stray from virtue are defeated dissidents, who bend under the pressure to conform.

It won’t wash, particularly as Jones cannot break with the pressures that enforce conformity in his left-wing world and accept the real reason why many leave the left. It ought to be obvious. The left is why they leave the left. Never more so than today.

In the past, people would head to the exits saying, ‘Better the centre right than the far left.’ Now they can say ‘better the centre right than the far right’. The shift of left-wing thought towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic has been building for years. I come from a left-wing family, marched against Margaret Thatcher and was one of the first journalists to denounce New Labour’s embrace of corporate capitalism — and I don’t regret any of it. But slowly, too slowly I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.

In 2007 I tried to make amends, and published What’s Left. If they were true to their professed principles, my book argued, modern leftists would search out secular forces in the Muslim world — Iranian and Arab feminists, say, Kurdish socialists or Muslim liberals struggling against reactionary clerics here in Britain — and embrace them as comrades. Instead, they preferred to excuse half the anti-western theocrats and dictators on the planet. As, in their quiet way, did many in the liberal mainstream. Throughout that period, I never heard the BBC demanding of ‘progressives’ how they could call themselves left-wing when they had not a word of comfort for the Iraqi and Afghan liberals al-Qaeda was slaughtering.

The triumph of Jeremy Corbyn has led to What’s Left sales picking up, and readers acclaiming my alleged prescience. Grateful though I am, I cannot accept the compliment. I never imagined that left-wing politics would get as bad as they have become. I assumed that when the criminally irresponsible Blair flew off in his Learjet, the better angels of the left’s nature would re-assert themselves.

What a fool I was.

Jeremy Corbyn did not become Labour leader because his friends in the Socialist Workers party organised a Leninist coup. Nor did the £3 click-activist day-trippers hand him victory. He won with the hearty and freely given support of ‘decent’ Labour members.

And yes, thank you, I know all about the feebleness of Corbyn’s opponents. But the fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.

They don’t put it like that, naturally. Their first response is to cry ‘smear’. When I show that it is nothing of the sort, they say that he was ‘engaging in dialogue’, even though Corbyn only ever has a ‘dialogue’ with one side and his ‘engagement’ never involves anything so principled as robust criticism.

A few on the British left are beginning to realise what they have done. Feminists were the first to stir from their slumber. They were outraged this week when Corbyn gave all his top jobs to men. I have every sympathy. But really, what did they expect from a man who never challenged the oppression of women in Iran when he was a guest on the state propaganda channel? You cannot promote equality at home while defending subjugation abroad and it was naive to imagine that Corbyn would try.

The women’s issue nicely illustrates the damage he can do, even if he never becomes prime minister. When Labour shows by its actions that it doesn’t believe in women’s equality, the pressure on other institutions diminishes. Secularists and liberal Muslims will feel a different kind of prejudice. They will no longer get a hearing for their campaigns against forced marriage and sharia law from a Labour party that counts the Muslim Brotherhood among his allies.

The position of the Jews is grimmer still. To be blunt, the new leader of the opposition is ‘friends’ with men who want them dead. One Jewish Labour supporter told me, ‘I feel like a gay man in the Tory party just after they’ve passed Section 28.’ Another described his position as ‘incredibly exposed’. He had ‘come to understand in the last few weeks, quite how shallow the attachment of the left is to principles which I thought defined it.’

And yes, thank you again, I know at this point I am meant to say that Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. Maybe he isn’t, but some of his best friends are, and the record shows that out of cynicism or conviction he will engage in the left’s version of ‘dog-whistle’ race politics.

I am middle-class and won’t suffer under the coming decade of majority Tory rule. Millions need a centre-left alternative, but I cannot see them being attracted by the revival of lumpen leftism either. Unlike their Scottish and French counterparts, the English intelligentsia has always had a problem with patriotism. Whenever this trend has manifested itself, voters have turned away, reasoning that politicians who appear to hate England are likely to have little time for the English.

By electing Corbyn, Labour has chosen a man who fits every cliché the right has used to mobilise working-class conservatism. In the 1790s, George Canning described the typical English supporter of the French Revolution ‘as a friend of every country but his own’. Today’s Tories can, with justice, say the same about Corbyn. George Orwell wrote of the ‘English intellectual [who] would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box’. That came to mind on Tuesday when Corbyn declined to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at the Battle of Britain remembrance service.

I opened What’s Left with a quote by Norman Cohn, from Warrant for Genocide, his history of how the conspiracy theories that ended in fascism began in the dark, neglected corners of 19th-century Europe:

It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people.

In the years since What’s Left was published, I have argued that the likes of Corbyn do not represent the true left; that there are other worthier traditions opposed to oppression whether the oppressors are pro-western or anti-western. I can’t be bothered any more. Cries of ‘I’m the real left!’, ‘No I’m the real left!’ are always silly. And in any case, there is no doubt which ‘real left’ has won.

The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.

I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.

So, for what it is worth, this is my resignation letter from the left. I have no idea who I should send it to or if there are forms to fill in. But I do know this: like so many before me, I can claim constructive dismissal.

]]>You might think that Jews, faced with a relentless campaign to ban their culture, would think once, twice, a hundred times, about instituting bans themselves. After they had thought about it, they would decide that, no, absolutely not, prudence as much as principle directs that they of all people must insist that art should be open to all.

A good liberal idea, you might think. So good and so obvious there’s no need to say more. If you still require an explanation, allow me to help. You don’t try to silence others if you believe in artistic and intellectual freedom. You keep your mind open and the conversation going. Every little Hitler and great dictator in history has tried to tell the public what it can and cannot see, and no one should want to join their company.

It says much about the political and religious neuroses of our time that the best defence of artistic freedom came this week from entertainment corporations, so often depicted in the arts as the home of grasping tyrants who crush creativity as they push their opium on the masses. Specifically, the managers of the Odeon UCI Cinemas Group and the tax exile Guy Hands, whose Terra Firma Capital owns the chain.

They made their stand for freedom on The Gift of Fire, which was due to be shown at London’s Israeli film festival. As far as I can tell, it is a ripping romance about a beautiful Jewish woman in medieval Spain fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. I’d love to tell you more about her scrapes. Alas, I cannot, for I am a man, and my unfortunate possession of a Y chromosome prevents me from seeing the film.

Its screening had been due to take place at the Odeon Swiss Cottage. But the director, Rechy Elias, insisted that only women could attend. Elias is from the ultra-conservative Haredi sect of Judaism, which, like extreme movements in all the world’s major religions, is flourishing with a depressing vigour. As with so many other fundamentalist creeds and cults, sex is an obsessive source of interest to the Haredis. A Haredi school in Stamford Hill recently announced that, Saudi–style, it would not allow women to drive children to its gates. With similar reasoning, Ms Elias said her film was controversial because it contained scenes of women dancing. No man could see them, for lord knows what they would do if they did.

The Odeon refused to ban. The only legal ground for stopping people going into their cinemas was if they were children trying to sneak into an adult movie, it said. Far from supporting it, the festival organisers were so outraged by the company’s defence of equality that they promised to ‘stand outside the cinema and stop men from going in’. When the cinema refused to back down, they withdrew the film. The JW3 arts centre, a private club with no obligation to treat people equally, agreed to show it to an all-female audience instead. The centre’s directors, like the organisers of the festival, said that if the director had known men might see her work she would have made a different film. Not one of them stopped to imagine how their endorsement of selective bans and appeasement of prejudice might look to others.

The line between ‘anti-Zionist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ protests in Britain has become so blurred of late you can barely see it. We have Jew-hating politicians and Muslim leaders feeding every type of conspiratorial fantasy, and artists have been cheering them on.

Last year London’s Tricycle Theatre banned the annual Jewish film festival because its organisers took a tiny amount of money from the Israeli government. The Tricycle did not insist that other performers — British or foreign — show that every penny of their funding met politically correct standards. The theatre did not believe that the hundreds of thousands of pounds it took from the British state was an endorsement of the government’s wars or policies. But when it came to Jews, different standards applied.

When Lord Keynes established the Arts Council he ensured that it worked at ‘arm’s length’ from ministers. Politicians would not then be able to impose their dogmas on publicly funded culture. The Tricycle offered a parable of how bureaucrats can hijack the public sector and subvert Keynes’s principles. It showed that while politicians, who whatever else you think about them are at least elected, cannot censor and impose party lines, unelected cultural bureaucrats are free to do both.

Individual artists are as disreputable as taxpayer-funded institutions. Just before the Israeli festival opened, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Peter Kosminsky and many another British film-makers called on cinemas to cancel performances. Imagine the malice or cold-blooded indifference it takes for one artist to try to ban the work of another. It wasn’t that Loach, Kosminsky and the rest had even paid their fellow directors the courtesy of watching their work. They weren’t saying that the festival was stuffed with Israeli government propaganda. They couldn’t, because it included the work of Israeli Arab and Palestinian film makers. No matter. Because the art was Israeli, it had to go.

Far from recoiling from the arguments of their enemies, the organisers of the festival showed that they were no better. Only in their case, instead of banning Jewish films, they banned Jewish men.

Racial, political, religious and sexual hysteria swirl round the art of a tiny people. Standing against all the prejudices is the profit motive of the modern corporation. I accept that Guy Hands makes an unlikely hero, and what with one thing and another there hasn’t been much good to say about capitalism of late. But I will say this. Capitalism may not be inspiring but at least it welcomes customers without regard for class, colour, creed, gender or sexual orientation. If it is legal to sell a product, it won’t care who buys it.

As extremists of all types tell us what we can see and say, that simple commercial creed feels pure and noble in comparison.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/06/censoring-jews/feed/198the Gift of FirefeaturedLen the loserhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/why-is-len-mccluskey-paying-carter-ruck-to-threaten-me/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/why-is-len-mccluskey-paying-carter-ruck-to-threaten-me/#commentsThu, 28 May 2015 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9540062It is not only Russian oligarchs and multinational corporations who run to the ‘capitalist courts’ — as we used to…

]]>It is not only Russian oligarchs and multinational corporations who run to the ‘capitalist courts’ — as we used to call them on the left. Have an argument with Len McCluskey and you find that the leader of Unite is prepared to spend his money, or more likely his members’ hard-earned dues, on hiring the libel lawyers of Carter-Ruck at £550 an hour (plus expenses, of course).

Carter-Ruck can charge a little more than the minimum wage because its many wealthy clients know that its lawyers will push as hard as they possibly can to defend clients’ interests, as our spat with McCluskey showed.

Last week I published a brisk blogpost on The Spectator’s site in which I said that the Labour party should recognise that Unite was its enemy. The cliché that Labour and the unions were in a marriage was apt, I said: they fight all the time and don’t have sex. But few marriages survive adultery — and McCluskey’s eyes were always wandering.

Only last year he threatened to sever Unite’s links with Labour if the party’s policies did not comply with his wishes. He would put his union’s money behind a new workers’ party to the left of Labour instead. Perhaps he could take Unite-sponsored MPs with him, I speculated. After all, Unite has attempted at least once to use its influence to place its men and women in parliament; in Falkirk, a Labour party investigation said there was ‘no doubt’ that Unite had recruited party members in an effort to ‘manipulate’ the selection of a parliamentary candidate.

Meanwhile, in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London last month, McCluskey’s sidekick Andrew Murray announced, after an election court had disbarred the mayor Lutfur Rahman for electoral fraud, that Unite was ‘proud’ to support Rahman.

I would like you to take a breath and reflect that the Tower Hamlets episode illustrates to perfection the decadence of parts of the British left. There is a comprehensible left-wing case for a new socialist party. There are times when I might even vote for one — although I am not sure how many others would. But Rahman fought the Labour party in the East End by exploiting racial and religious division, in a manner leftists would rightly denounce if a white Ukip politician were to do the same. Rahman directed public money to Bangladeshis who were likely to vote for him, Judge Richard Mawrey found. He even diverted funds meant for the Alzheimer’s Society. Not content with that, Rahman and his associates bribed Asian TV stations to give him favourable coverage. He persuaded clerics to instruct their poor and credulous followers that it was an Islamic duty to vote for him, and to warn them that if they did not they would be siding with their Islamophobic enemies.

In other words, Rahman engaged in racial profiling, the exploitation of religious superstition for political advantage. He also perpetrated an electoral fraud, which denied the people of the East End their basic right to have their views represented in a fair election. Despite all of the above and more, Unite, Ken Livingstone and much of the left press excused him because Rahman claimed to be an enemy of the status quo.

Don’t be the put-upon wife, I told Labour. Dump the creep before the creep dumps you.

Instead of arguing back, McCluskey instructed his £550-an-hour libel lawyers to condemn our ‘highly defamatory’ portrayal of their client. I had wounded McCluskey. The poor little thing was ‘suffering from hurt and distress’ after the ‘extraordinary and grossly irresponsible’ decision of the editor to publish my piece.

McCluskey wanted an apology. Oh, and money. Not just damages but ‘aggravated damages’ and — lest we forgot — Carter-Ruck’s legal expenses, too. The Spectator’s lawyers told the Carter-Ruckers that their demands were ‘absurd’, and they appear to have gone away. Absurd or not, they can succeed. Whenever I am up against bullies, I congratulate myself on joining the campaign for libel-law reform. Thanks to its fine work, writers can finally express their ‘honest opinion’. Or rather some writers can. I am lucky to work for newspapers, which can afford to fight. Unite’s lawyers have also menaced a political website which offended McCluskey. Such websites cannot think of fighting libel cases and this sort of bullying therefore achieves its purpose of shutting down criticism.

Demands to censor can be a sign of strength. The magnate exercises his power by letting his opponents know that those who cross him will pay. But McCluskey’s threats betray his weakness. Britain’s trade unions are dying. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the 20 years between 1973 and 1992, an average of 7.8 million working days a year were lost because of strike action. In 2013, that figure fell to a mere 444,000 days. The unions have failed to recruit and offer help to the new working poor in the care, hospitality and service industries. Only 14 per cent of private–sector workers are trade union members. The future of those scraping a living in shopping centres and call centres is precarious and non-unionised.

McCluskey could form a new left-wing party, but the Greens have filled that space. Meanwhile, he must answer hard questions from his militants, who want to know why Unite needs a political fund at all. Like the syndicalists of the early 20th century, they want to give up on politics and concentrate on the ‘industrial struggle’. They have a point, and not just because zero-hours contracts and austerity give them much to struggle against. The tens of millions that Unite has given to the Labour party have not brought Labour to power. Indeed, Unite’s influence in making Ed Miliband Labour leader in 2010 ensured its defeat in 2015. McCluskey shows no sign of learning from his mistake, and seems ready to repeat his trick of pulling Labour away from the centre ground.

Behind all the threats and the bombast, his power is the precise opposite of what he believes it to be. All he can do is stop Labour winning.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/why-is-len-mccluskey-paying-carter-ruck-to-threaten-me/feed/161BA Cabin Crew Staff Meet To Discuss The Recent Strike Action BallotfeaturedServants of the super-richhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/posh-educated-and-energetic-meet-the-servants-of-the-super-rich/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/posh-educated-and-energetic-meet-the-servants-of-the-super-rich/#commentsThu, 14 May 2015 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9527222‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ Indeed…

]]>‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ Indeed they are. They can afford to live in London.

Just how different became clear when The Spear’s 500 — ‘the essential guide to the top private client advisers’ — landed at the office. (We assume Spear’s sent it by mistake. We write for love here at The Spectator, and would be insulted if the editor offered us anything so vulgar as money.)

Still I was glad to read it. Spear’s paints the best portrait I have seen of a world beyond our means and comprehension. Do you have a starstruck child you wish to impress? One Lady Cosima Somerset of Concierge London boasts how she arranged a ‘chance’ encounter between a famous actress and a client to ‘wow’ his 12-year-old daughter. Or maybe you want a party that would make Fitzgerald’s Gatsby gasp. Dora Lowenstein Associates describes how they threw a bash for a client which was so star-studded that ‘Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were little more than faces in the crowd’.

The editor, William Cash, son of Bill, does not quite say so, but the guide is aimed at helping the world’s super-rich find a home among us. It tells them that everything their money can buy is here waiting for them.

There are lists of private bankers, investment managers and tax lawyers, to manage their money; family lawyers, who can draw up pre-nups and fight staggeringly expensive divorce cases when the loves of their lives turn out to be gold-digging hussies; immigration lawyers, who can get them residence in Britain while sparing them the need to pay British taxes; libel lawyers who have rebranded themselves as ‘reputation managers’, who will sue those who fail to show them the required respect; and security specialists who can help them ward off fears of polonium-210 in the granola.

Spear’s has equine advisers, interior designers, yacht and classic car specialists, and wine and art connoisseurs. However much these sound like the help you yearn to be able to hire, much of their advice is miserablist. Fine wines, Spear’s tells us, are ‘especially tax-efficient investments as they are regarded as deteriorating assets by HMRC’. How joyless and dispiriting. What is the point of being rich if you look at a case of Château Pétrus and see only an investment?

I was as dispirited to discover that the only members of the Spear’s 500 I knew or was ever likely to know were lawyers who had tried to sue me for writing about their clients. I will never meet the rest. Nor in all likelihood will you.

It costs a lot to be rich in 2015. To announce you are merely a HNWI (high net worth individual) is to admit to shabby gentility. The men and women who advertise themselves and their services in Spear’s are interested in UHNWIs (ultra high net worth individuals) with assets of £20 million or more. Cash tells us the ‘cautionary tale’ of a friend whose family had banked with Coutts for generations. One morning a letter arrived saying that the minimum level for a Coutts account was now £1 million and she would be barred if she could not increase her balance.

The old world of old families treating their private banker as a friend and confidant is gone. Today it does not matter where your parents and grandparents banked. If you ain’t got the brass, you don’t get the class.

A few figures give you a small idea of the large sums you need to keep up. London has the greatest number of UNWHIs in the world. Luxury property here is the third most expensive in the world, according to Knight Frank. Only Monaco and Hong Kong, where a shortage of building land creates artificial house price inflation, surpass it.

A vast service industry serves the super-rich’s needs. London wealth management employs 23,000 people and contributes £3.2 billion to GDP. St James’s, Mayfair and Canary Wharf have overtaken Zurich and made London the wealth management capital of the world.

So great is the number of oligarchs wishing to come here that the Indian government tried to restrict the amount of money its rich could take out of the country. Camilla Dell, a property consultant, notes that ‘prospective Indian clients wanting to buy something in London’ put their deals on hold. But, she reassures us, wealthy Indians soon ‘found ways’ of getting round the restrictions.

At first glance, the men and women who greet them don’t look like servants. They parade their degrees from Oxford, Harvard Business School and Insead, and emphasise their virility. Charlie Hoffman of HSBC Private Bank tells us that he unwinds by skydiving. ‘It’s like synchronised swimming at 150mph — it actually brings the heart rate down.’ Spear’s describes Kirstin Boldarin, a wealth manager from Stonehage, as an ‘athletic South African’ who enjoys ‘a life balance of Italian cooking offset by long-distance running’ — a sure recipe for flatulence and cramp in my experience, but perhaps it impresses others.

The grandness of their qualification and vigour of their exercises cannot hide the fact that for all their gym-toned bodies and Oxbridge-trained minds they are servants of a largely foreign plutocracy. To his credit, the aptly named Cash does not try to hide it.

‘I have noticed,’ he says, ‘the number of former industrial, retail and manufacturing British families whose core business today is providing advice to a new generation of entrepreneurs.’ The Spear’s 500 includes a great-grandson of Winston Churchill, Randolph Churchill (a wealth manager at Rathbones), who rather than trying to lead his country has settled for understanding ‘all his clients’ needs and not just their wealth management requirements’.

Cash himself describes with honesty and pathos how his family lost their weaving business in the 1970s. He tried to buy it back and make his family a manufacturing family once again, but he could not make the deal work. Like so many others from the British elite, he has settled for tending to the needs of the far wealthier elites of Russia and Asia; to being a member of a servant class rather than a productive class.

When the Conservatives won their majority last week, I wondered why I was so upset. It is not that I hate them. I know the modern left can behave just as badly as the modern right — worse, on occasion, because its patina of righteousness allows it to get away with more. I realised that I felt sick to my stomach because I feared for my home city. The Spear’s 500 went to press before the count. As you flick through its pages, you catch a faint hint of fear in the booming self-confident voices of its wealth managers and equine advisers. What will happen if Labour wins and tax breaks for nom-doms go? Will the Russians and Indians keep coming if taxes on homes worth £2 million or more rise?

They had no need to fret. Buyers swamped central London estate agents with orders of £500 million on Friday morning. Agents predicted prices would soar by 10 per cent as the Tory victory let loose a ‘surge in pent-up activity’.

The working and middle classes will carry on fleeing the capital. Housing association homes will go the way of council homes as David Cameron dumps them at a discount. The circle from central London within which only the wealthiest can live will grow ever wider, and the once great, exciting, industrious and creative metropolis of London will become what the Spear’s 500 want it to become: Monaco without the sunshine.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/posh-educated-and-energetic-meet-the-servants-of-the-super-rich/feed/62SpearsfeaturedThe Wallström affairhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/03/swedens-feminist-foreign-minister-has-dared-to-tell-the-truth-about-saudi-arabia-what-happens-now-concerns-us-all/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/03/swedens-feminist-foreign-minister-has-dared-to-tell-the-truth-about-saudi-arabia-what-happens-now-concerns-us-all/#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9481542If the cries of ‘Je suis Charlie’ were sincere, the western world would be convulsed with worry and anger about…

]]>If the cries of ‘Je suis Charlie’ were sincere, the western world would be convulsed with worry and anger about the Wallström affair. It has all the ingredients for a clash-of-civilisations confrontation.

A few weeks ago Margot Wallström, the Swedish foreign minister, denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. As the theocratic kingdom prevents women from travelling, conducting official business or marrying without the permission of male guardians, and as girls can be forced into child marriages where they are effectively raped by old men, she was telling no more than the truth. Wallström went on to condemn the Saudi courts for ordering that Raif Badawi receive ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for setting up a website that championed secularism and free speech. These were ‘mediaeval methods’, she said, and a ‘cruel attempt to silence modern forms of expression’. And once again, who can argue with that?

The backlash followed the pattern set by Rushdie, the Danish cartoons and Hebdo. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador and stopped issuing visas to Swedish businessmen. The United Arab Emirates joined it. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which represents 56 Muslim-majority states, accused Sweden of failing to respect the world’s ‘rich and varied ethical standards’ — standards so rich and varied, apparently, they include the flogging of bloggers and encouragement of paedophiles. Meanwhile, the Gulf Co-operation Council condemned her ‘unaccept-able interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, and I wouldn’t bet against anti-Swedish riots following soon.

Yet there is no ‘Wallström affair’. Outside Sweden, the western media has barely covered the story, and Sweden’s EU allies have shown no inclination whatsoever to support her. A small Scandinavian nation faces sanctions, accusations of Islamophobia and maybe worse to come, and everyone stays silent. As so often, the scandal is that there isn’t a scandal.

It is a sign of how upside-down modern politics has become that one assumes that a politician who defends freedom of speech and women’s rights in the Arab world must be some kind of muscular liberal, or neocon, or perhaps a supporter of one of Scandinavia’s new populist right-wing parties whose commitment to human rights is merely a cover for anti-Muslim hatred. But Margot Wallström is that modern rarity: a left-wing politician who goes where her principles take her.

She is foreign minister in Sweden’s weak coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, and took office promising a feminist foreign policy. She recognised Palestine in October last year — and, no, the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Co-operation and Gulf Co-operation Council did not condemn her ‘unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Israel’. I confess that her gesture struck me as counterproductive at the time. But after Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out a Palestinian state as he used every dirty trick he could think of to secure his re-election, she can claim with justice that history has vindicated her.

She moved on to the Saudi version of sharia law. Her criticism was not just rhetorical. She said that it was unethical for Sweden to continue with its military co-operation agreement with Saudi Arabia. In other words, she threatened Swedish arms companies’ ability to make money. Saudi Arabia’s denial of business visas to Swedes threatened to hurt other companies’ profits too. You might think of Swedes as upright social democrats, who have never let worries of appearing tedious stand in the way of their righteousness. But that has never been wholly true, and is certainly not true when there is money at stake.

Sweden is the world’s 12th largest arms exporter — quite an achievement for a country of just nine million people. Its exports to Saudi Arabia total $1.3 billion. Business leaders and civil servants are also aware that other Muslim-majority countries may follow Saudi Arabia’s lead. During the ‘cartoon crisis’ — a phrase I still can’t write without snorting with incredulity — Danish companies faced global attacks and the French supermarket chain Carrefour took Danish goods off the shelves to appease Muslim customers. A co-ordinated campaign by Muslim nations against Sweden is not a fanciful notion. There is talk that Sweden may lose its chance to gain a seat on the UN Security Council in 2017 because of Wallström.

To put it as mildly as I can, the Swedish establishment has gone wild. Thirty chief executives signed a letter saying that breaking the arms trade agreement ‘would jeopardise Sweden’s reputation as a trade and co-operation partner’. No less a figure than His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf himself hauled Wallström in at the weekend to tell her that he wanted a compromise. Saudi Arabia has successfully turned criticism of its brutal version of Islam into an attack on all Muslims, regardless of whether they are Wahhabis or not, and Wallström and her colleagues are clearly unnerved by accusations of Islamophobia. The signs are that she will fold under the pressure, particularly when the rest of liberal Europe shows no interest in supporting her.

Sins of omission are as telling as sins of commission. The Wallström non-affair tells us three things. It is easier to instruct small countries such as Sweden and Israel on what they can and cannot do than America, China or a Saudi Arabia that can call on global Muslim support when criticised. Second, a Europe that is getting older and poorer is starting to find that moral stands in foreign policy are luxuries it can no longer afford. Saudi Arabia has been confident throughout that Sweden needs its money more than it needs Swedish imports.

Finally, and most revealingly in my opinion, the non-affair shows us that the rights of women always come last. To be sure, there are Twitter storms about sexist men and media feeding frenzies whenever a public figure uses ‘inappropriate language’. But when a politician tries to campaign for the rights of women suffering under a brutally misogynistic clerical culture she isn’t cheered on but met with an embarrassed and hugely revealing silence.

]]>Tell Mama is Britain’s most prominent opponent of anti-Muslim prejudice. It monitors everything from criminal assaults to everyday abuse. The far right loathes it, and the Conservative press sells the grotesque pretence that the group exaggerates prejudice to divert attention from the horror of Islamist violence.

But attacks from the right only wound. Tell Mama’s ‘friends’ in the Muslim community have turned out to be far more dangerous and are threatening to destroy the organisation. ‘I am on a knife edge,’ one activist told me. ‘I may just leave. I’m so fed up.’

Two weeks ago Andrew Gilligan reported in the Sunday Telegraph that Baroness Warsi’s Whitehall working group on anti-Muslim hatred has been infiltrated by men with backgrounds in organisations that can hate for England. Muddassar Ahmed, for instance, worked with the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, a fanatical outfit with Jews on the brain. During the last two elections it devoted its energies to campaigning against ‘Zionist’ MPs. Labour’s Lorna Fitzsimons lost her seat after the organisation told local Muslims to sack her because she was ‘Jewish’.

Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama and a former adviser to Nick Clegg, told the Sunday Telegraph he was so concerned ‘about the kinds of groups some of the members had connections with, and some of the groups they were recommending be brought into government’ that he left Warsi’s committee.

The baroness presents herself as a plain-speaking politician. But as with Nigel Farage, her relaxed image hides the soul of a control freak. I hear rumours of a threatened libel action, and of intense lobbying of the board of Tell Mama to force Mughal to back down.

While pressure was applied in private, a public campaign began on Twitter under the hashtag ‘Don’t Tell Mama’. It urged Muslims to wreck the organisation by boycotting it. Tell Mama’s critics accused it of being soft on the ‘heretical’ Ahmadi sect, soft on liberal Muslims who say cartoons of Mohammed don’t offend them, and soft on Jews. ‘So you do have supporters of Israel on board?’ one accuser asked. Mughal replied that Tell Mama’s backers opposed the Israeli occupation but some thought that Jews had a right to a state. Such heresy horrified his critics.

Tell Mama knows a truth that it has taken my generation of liberal leftists half a lifetime to learn: there are two far rights in Britain. The group documents the behaviour of mainly white racists: thugs who spit at women in headscarves. But because it believes in universal values, it works with all who are victims of bigotry. Tell Mama’s board includes a Muslim support group for lesbians and gays, and Peter Tatchell, that indomitable fighter against homophobia, is also on it. Just as Tell Mama attacks prejudices against Muslims, so it defends homosexuals when Muslim clerics compare them to murderers and paedophiles.

Tell Mama has learned from attempts by Jews to protect themselves, and recruited Richard Benson, from the Jewish Community Support Trust, to be its co-chairman. As well as condemning violence against Muslims, it condemns violence against Jewish people.

But the group’s enemies care nothing for consistent principles. They want others to condemn hatred against Muslims from white extremists, but not Muslim extremists’ hatred of Ahmadis, liberal Muslims or Jews.

Tell Mama may win through. But the people I’m talking to sound as if the stress is too much for them. If they go under, we will measure the triumph of sectarianism in yet more demands for double standards and restrictions on free speech, and yet more excuses for terror. In ways too few appreciate, however, we will also measure the awful consequences for British Muslims. In the East End of London, just down the road from where I am writing, the unemployment rate among Bangladeshis is astonishingly high. Hardly anyone talks about it, because blocks of British Asians are now identified as ‘the Muslims’, men and women interested only in religion. Their accepted leaders are clerics who are happy to leave potential employers with the impression that Muslims are prickly and paranoid, and perhaps best avoided.

If this carries on, we will have a religious underclass. The rest of society will notice only when it turns to violence. Most of the time, we will be secretly happy that our children are not facing competition from bright Bangladeshis or Pakistanis. We will mouth all the PC platitudes, of course, and make a great show of avoiding ‘offence’. The usual hypocrisies out of the way, we will then shrug our shoulders and carry on as if Muslims don’t exist.

The battle for Tell Mama is a battle for the future of British Islam, and it looks as if the wrong side is winning.

At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them company. A leader-writer for the Times and its resident authority on style, Kamm is the most small ‘c’ conservative man I know. If he has ever left home without cleaning his shoes — and I doubt that he has — he would have realised his mistake before reaching the end of his road, and rushed back to apply the polish. Instead of joining the pedants, however, Kamm batters them. Accidence Will Happen is a joyous and joyously liberating assault on ‘rules’ of grammar which are little more than a hodgepodge of contradictory superstitions.

Kamm’s weapons are erudition and raw polemical vigour. Berating people on superstitious stylistic grounds is worse than self-defeating, he says. ‘It undermines the cause of clear writing and damages appreciation of the real study of language.’

There is no literate reason for thinking end-of-sentence prepositions are prepositions to be scared of. And no reason not to start sentences with ‘and’. To shrilly insist on never splitting infinitives is to fall into the mistake first made by 18th-century grammarians that English is Latin. (It isn’t, by the way.) ‘The journalist was forced strenuously to insist he hadn’t fiddled his expenses’ is poor English. Does it mean the force used was strenuous or the denial was strenuous? Worse, like so many other pseudo-rules, it trips up writers and speakers, ties their tongues and dents their confidence

Unlike so many others who arbitrate on usage, Kamm relies on linguistic scholarship rather than the prohibitions of long-dead schoolmasters. No serious scholar believes that a language is anything other than what people write and speak. In language, you cannot be right against the world. If an ‘incorrect’ form is more widely understood than its alternative, it cannot be ‘wrong’. There is no external judge who can pass a guilty sentence on common usage for a reason Dr Johnson understood when he rejected proposals for an English version of the Académie Française. You cannot, he said, preserve obsolete words and forms when what makes them obsolete is the ‘general agreement to forbear’ them.

You may regret that disinterested can now mean uninterested as well as impartial, although if you make a fuss you will betray your ignorance that in the 17th century disinterested meant uninterested too. You may want to ban people from starting sentences with ‘hopefully’ — although no pedant has explained why it is not also wrong to start sentences with ‘thankfully’ — but you will be fighting a losing battle against a living language, which is always changing. Your ‘rules’ will be no more than incoherent prejudices.

In their barren hearts, pedants must know this. I assume that not even Simon Heffer would call his wife and announce, ‘Darling, it’s I’. (But maybe I am doing him a disservice.)

Kamm is not a siren luring us into linguistic permissiveness. As he says, children master the complex grammar of their native tongue with astonishing speed. We already know grammar. (If we didn’t, we would not be understood.) Nor does Kamm argue that poor children should not master Standard English. It is the dialect of social advancement, and they need it to succeed in the world, whatever dialect they use at home or among their friends.

Rather he fights to allow Standard English to breathe. The second half of his book is an A-Z list of usage conundrums. It is the most sensible style guide I have read, not least because Kamm always puts clarity first. I have only had Accidence Will Happen for a week, and have already referred to it dozens of times.

If this book is a bestseller, as it may well be, its monument will be the liberated prose of the writers Kamm has freed. Instead of stumbling on the obstacles pedants have strewn in their path, they will concentrate on the hard but satisfying task of working out what they want to say and who they want to say it to. They will rise like lions from their slumber. They will cast off the chains of Truss, send the Heffer out to pasture, and in an indomitable voice cry, ‘Yes we Kamm!’

]]>A few days ago Imtiaz, a solar engineer; Aliya, a campaigner for secular education; Sohail, a gay Somali in his twenties; and Sara, a bright student, went to Queen Mary University of London in the East End and made an astonishingly brave stand.

Astonishing because they volunteered to step forward to the front line after the Islamist murders of satirists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen. Before an audience and in front of cameras, they explained why they had left Islam. They had become ‘apostates’, to use a dangerous word, which blackens what ought to be a personal decision that free adults in free countries ought to be free to make without anyone threatening them. In the mouths of theocrats, ‘apostasy’ turns individual rights to freedom of conscience into a sin and a betrayal.

The ex-Muslims knew all about the costs of challenging the taboos of their families. Sara was sparkling and funny, but her voice cracked when she described how her parents ‘chose religion over me’, and how the last words she remembered her sister saying were to wish that she were dead.

Any child who breaks away from a devoutly or fanatically religious background or a sectarian or political cult faces the same pain. Your parents hate you for rejecting their dogmas. Shame at your treacherous rejection of your tribe and its taboos supplants love, and you become an outcast.

But there is something else with Islam. Most ex-Muslims are in the closet because they live with the fear of violence. If you want to go to one of their meetings, they will vet you first to see if you are a spy who will denounce them to their violent enemies. This in London, the supposedly cosmopolitan capital of a democratic country, with a Human Rights Act that supposedly guarantees religious freedom.

Except that in practice Britain does no such thing. The religious have the freedom to proselytise and seek converts, and to insist that their remarkably tender feelings be treated with ‘respect’. But the converse does not apply. If ex-Muslims denounce religious bigotry, they put themselves in danger.

The young people at Queen Mary’s sent tingles down my spine because they had decided to fight back. ‘I’d had enough of talking to people in secret,’ Imtiaz told me. ‘I want to help others who are going through what I went through when I came out by telling my story openly.’

As always with religion, you can find divine authority for both the tolerant and the tyrannical. Liberal Muslims ought to be able to point to the Qur’an (Chapter 2 verse 256 ) which states: ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’ Unfortunately for them the hadiths — purported sayings of Mohammed collected by Sahih Bukhari in the 9th century — state equally clearly: ‘Whoever changes his religion, kill him.’

Across the Muslim world today the tyrannical are triumphing over the tolerant. It is not just the Islamic State, Iran and other enemies of the West who punish apostasy with death, but the West’s ‘allies’ in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Unsurprisingly in an interconnected world, the foul belief that you can punish men and women for following their consciences flourishes in Britain too.

Last year Britain’s Council of ex-Muslims produced a report on the publicly quoted opinions of the leading figures in the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IEra). Do not let its numbingly bureaucratic name fool you. One minute a supporter called Ifthekar Jaman was distributing Islamist propaganda in Portsmouth while dressed in an IEra-supplied T-shirt. The next he was fighting and eventually dying for Isis in Iraq. Its leaders peddle all the usual prejudices about gays, women and Jews. And alongside those enemies stand apostates. Hamza Tzortzis, a founder and leading speaker of IEra, was asked whether Islam condones a death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy.

‘Yes it does, yes,’ he replied, before going on to opine that beheading would be a painless means of killing ex-Muslims.

Other speakers have said that Muslims have no choice but to accept sharia law and its lethal punishments, whether they believed or not. There are many other groups and individuals who think the same, though few admit their dark thoughts with the same brazenness. Apostasy to this mentality covers not only ex-Muslims but liberal Muslims too. A mob whipped up in part on Twitter by the slippery figure of Mo Ansar accused Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation of being a blasphemer and traitor because he said he found a harmless image of Mohammed harmless. The fight to defend ex-Muslims therefore is a fight to defend all Muslims who reject extremism.

But can you see British society joining it? Simon Cottee, the author of an excellent new study The Apostates (published by Hurst & Co next month) shows how elements in the left and academia are happy to denounce Muslims who exercise their freedom to abandon their religion as ‘native informers’ who have gone over to the side of western imperialism. As for the liberal mainstream, you only have to listen to all the cowardly voices who say the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo had ‘provoked’ their own murder, or that the Jews of Paris and Copenhagen had it coming because of Israel, to know how they would duck out of a confrontation.

If you search YouTube for ‘ex-Muslim voices’, you will see that the speakers at Queen Mary’s were pleasant, articulate and ironic people. Not so different from you and me. But listen to what they have to say and you will understand that they are better and braver than almost everyone you meet. They are prepared to fight for the liberal values we have forgotten how to cherish, let alone defend.

]]>When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need.

I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy.

If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would be worth reading if the professor had never been the victim of a royal vendetta. Ernst describes growing up in post-war Bavaria, and realising that men who had committed unthinkable crimes were all around him. When his stepfather persisted too long in criticising the laziness of the young generation, Ernst burst out: ‘Isn’t it lucky that we are not as well-organised and efficient as you? We will never manage the logistics of gassing six million Jews.’

He worked in a German homeopathic hospital, and found its directors believed the pseudoscience could accomplish nothing beyond placebo effects. They knew that Samuel Hahnemann’s theory that ‘like cures like’ made no sense. Onions make you cry, but that does not mean onions can cure hay fever just because it also makes you cry, particularly when a homeopath dilutes a trace of onion so thoroughly not one oniony molecule remains in the ‘medicine’.

Ernst came to Britain, fleeing the hierarchical stuffiness of the West German medical system of the 1970s. By then it was already clear that he had no time for quackery in its medical, social and political guises. If they ever met, Prince Charles was bound to hate him.

In 1992, Ernst decided on a career change that mystified his colleagues. He had published more than a thousand papers, and received 14 medical prizes. Instead of taking a prestigious academic post, he applied for an obscure professorship at Exeter University so that he could investigate the safety and effectiveness of alternative medicines.

His decision was not so surprising. Ernst’s specialism was the rehabilitation of patients. He noticed that his colleagues would send their charges off for spinal manipulation, acupuncture and massage therapy when they had no evidence to justify the treatments. You only have to look in a chemist to see why he was interested. Alternative therapy is a huge business, worth $1.6 billion in Britain and $100 billion worldwide. But glance at its products, and you will never see independent assessments of a treatment’s efficacy or dangers.

Ernst and his team of researchers displayed great ingenuity in designing random-ised clinical trials, which were imitated in research centres around the world. They found that chiropractic manipulation of the spine was dangerous in itself — we should ban it. Meanwhile homeopathic remedies, spiritual or distance healing and acupuncture had no medical benefits beyond placebo effects.

From the start, Ernst experienced the hostility of therapists, who responded to criticism with the ferocity of Scientologists. He concluded that they thrived in a wider British culture that ‘was curiously indifferent to the concept of truth’.

Inevitably, Prince Charles raged the loudest. Few supporters of monarchy understand that the Prince’s views are almost medieval in their obscurity. His published writings show that in the dispute between Galileo and the papacy, our future sovereign is on the side of the papacy and against the scientific method, and remains on the papacy’s side four centuries after the event and long after the church has conceded defeat.

After Prince Charles promoted a diet that recommended curing cancer with coffee enemas, Professor Michael Baum told him: ‘The power of my authority comes with a knowledge built on 40 years of study and 25 years of active involvement in cancer. Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life-threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies.’

No chance of that, as Ernst found out. He warned that the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health was promoting treatments without assessing their effectiveness. He told the Prince’s Duchy Originals business that it was passing off bogus herbal remedies as reputable treatments. When the Prince persuaded an economist without medical training to produce a report urging the NHS to save billions by adopting quack remedies, the Times obtained an early draft. Ernst told its reporter that the Prince was peddling misleading information and ‘overstepping his constitutional role’.

The Prince’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, disgraced himself and the traditions of free debate in this country by demanding that Exeter University discipline Ernst. After a 13-month investigation, Exeter found no evidence to justify Peat’s charges, but royal displeasure was enough to cow its servile administrators. Ernst had made Exeter an internationally acclaimed centre of medical research. No matter. First they limited his contacts with the press, and then they stopped raising funds for his centre. Ernst left, and without funding his team disbanded. Exeter University returned to the comfort of being a mediocre home for failed Oxbridge candidates, and Britain lost its only centre for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the ‘cures’ that cranks and hucksters push at the public. All because of a prince who lacks a well-rounded adult’s ability to learn his own limitations as well as the limitations of monarchical power.

As the reign of Charles III approaches, it is the duty of monarchists to tackle him. The hereditary principle is their system. Prince Charles is their problem. At the very least, they should insist on Parliament defining where a royal can intervene in politics and public life. If they had any sense — and I doubt that all of them do — they would insist on the crown skipping a generation. They must surely have seen enough by now. They must surely know that a King Charles III will be nothing but trouble.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/01/as-a-republican-i-used-to-look-forward-to-charles-iii-now-im-scared/feed/287Prince Of Wales And The Duchess Of Cornwall Visit Mexico - Day 3featuredBetween the floodshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/01/how-long-will-it-be-before-the-climate-forces-us-to-change/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/01/how-long-will-it-be-before-the-climate-forces-us-to-change/#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9415262This time last year, homeowners in Oxfordshire and Berkshire were recovering after storms had brought down power lines and blocked…

]]>This time last year, homeowners in Oxfordshire and Berkshire were recovering after storms had brought down power lines and blocked roads. Soon, power cuts were the least of their problems. The Thames flooded. In the south-west, the emergency services evacuated the Somerset Levels, and the sea wall at Dawlish in Devon collapsed — cutting the rail line to Cornwall.

Political Britain burst its banks. Ed Miliband demanded action. David Cameron convened emergency committees. TV reporters brought us urgent reports as water lapped their boots, while newspaper correspondents named the guilty men.

As in twenty20 cricket, you enjoy a quick intense hit with 24/7 news, then move on to the next game. The weather will not be an election issue. We will have the economy, the NHS, fake statistics, and possible permutations of coalition partners more complicated than a Jane Austen heroine’s dance card, but no argument about momentous changes.

Debate is confined to rows about whether deforestation and man-made emissions cause climate change. I believe it is scientifically illiterate to think otherwise. But what I believe is an irrelevance. The causes of climate change are one thing — unless you hold that the climate is not changing, then you should worry about the consequences.

At the end of his recently published Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century, Geoffrey Parker says of our time that there ‘may perhaps be residual doubts’ about man-made climate change, ‘just as some still deny that smoking tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer, but the historical record leaves no doubt that climate change occurs, and that it can have catastrophic consequences’.

Politicians do not want to talk about consequences because they are so expensive. A briefing paper from the House of Commons library drew up a bill from the available research. One in six homes in Britain is at risk from flooding, and annual flood damage costs around £1.1 billion. The Office of Science and Technology estimated that the costs could rise to £27 billion by 2080 if current trends continue, and to prevent that calamity would take huge state intervention.

If you don’t like ‘if current trends continue’ predictions — I don’t — remember that civil servants aren’t only worrying about climate change. The cost of maintaining a crumbling flood defence and drainage system is rising. As the population grows, we will build more homes on floodplains, pave over more land. The burden does not end there. British aid workers urge benighted foreigners not to denude their lands. They forget to add that the British have denuded theirs. ‘Rather than rail against nature, there is a need to make us more resilient to flood hazard,’ says Sue Dawson, a geographer from Dundee University. We must reforest uplands so that trees can soak up rainfall, and ‘make room for water’ by reversing the draining of marshes.

I am a city-dweller who loves to walk. The idea of reforesting valleys appeals to me more than I can say. If I were a farmer faced with compulsory purchase orders on my land, however, or the owner of a home or business in a floodplain told to waterproof their property or lose insurance, I might not be so keen.

Affronted interests delay change. Proposals for a Thames barrier were first heard in the 18th century. Pressure from merchants, for whose ships it would block the Thames, stopped the idea until 1966, when Professor Hermann Bondi, the then chief scientific adviser, said the capital should not live with the risk of storm tides that would be ‘knockout blows to the nerve centre of the country’. Since its completion, the barrier has been activated with increasing frequency — 39 times between 1983 and 2000, and 75 times between 2001 and 2010 — as extreme weather has become more common.

Most Londoners barely notice. The most powerful city in the nation sits snug behind its defences. Will it worry about the rest of the country? Will, indeed, the five out of six homes not at risk of flooding want to pay more tax to protect the ones that are?

Parker shows how the mini-ice age of the 17th century provoked wars, revolutions, famines and incredible suffering. No modern historian can substantiate the claim of contemporaries that a third of the world’s population died. But Parker’s account of the fall of the Ming dynasty, Russia’s time of troubles, the collapse of stable Ottoman rule, the Thirty Years War, the French Frondes, the British civil wars, and the revolts against the Spanish monarchy, suggests that contemporaries weren’t far off the mark.

Why, he wonders, aren’t we better at facing climate change, when humans are meant to be adaptable creatures? A part of the answer in the rich world lies in our belief that we have escaped the nature. We think of natural disasters as calamities that strike elsewhere. If that was once true, it isn’t now.

A human capacity to postpone awkward decisions plays its part, too. After the 2004/5 hurricane season — which brought not only Katrina but seven of the costliest hurricanes yet to strike the US — the National Hurricane Centre asked why Americans kept building on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. They lacked foresight, it concluded. Most had never experienced a direct hit and thought it couldn’t happen to them. Even among those who had lived through a hurricane, memories faded.

Europe adapted to the climate crisis of the 17th century by developing insurance and minimal welfare states. But the change took decades. Vested interests fought it, as now. People did not want to pay higher taxes, as now. As much as anything, says Parker, ‘the frequency of natural disasters mattered as much as their magnitude’. Only repeated catastrophes made our ancestors act.

By this reckoning, it will be many years before climate change forces us to change.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/01/how-long-will-it-be-before-the-climate-forces-us-to-change/feed/127UK Braced For Further Storms As Rain And Snow Bring More Flood MiseryfeaturedOur suicidal mediahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/10/our-suicidal-newspapers-are-throwing-press-freedom-away/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/10/our-suicidal-newspapers-are-throwing-press-freedom-away/#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9337461With the possible, although far from certain, exception of the men and women who hire me, it is fair to…

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With the possible, although far from certain, exception of the men and women who hire me, it is fair to say that Britain’s editors have a death wish. They suppress their own freedom. They hold out their wrists and beg the state to handcuff them. They are so lost in ideological frenzy that they cannot see that free journalism is the first casualty of their culture wars.

The Daily Mail acclaimed David Cameron’s threat to repeal the Human Rights Act and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights as ‘triumphant’. Within days, we learned how the ‘triumphant’ state treats the Mail on Sunday when it thinks no one is looking. Without a warrant from a judge, Kent police officers trawled records of thousands of calls to its news desk. In other words, they hacked its phones. The police hate the comparison, but it still holds. Just as celebrities could accuse tabloid journalists of threatening their right to privacy under the Human Rights Act, so journalists can now accuse the police of threatening their right to free expression, which the judges in Strasbourg have ruled includes protection for a journalist’s sources.

The police targeted the Mail on Sunday because it was on the fringes of the Chris Huhne affair. You will remember that a roadside camera caught him speeding. Huhne persuaded his wife, Vicky Pryce, to pretend she was driving so that he could escape a ban, thus involving them in a (rather small) conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Huhne would have got away with it, had he not enraged his wife with the surest method known to man: running off with another woman. But Pryce did not come out and tell the truth. Instead, her friend Constance Briscoe — a judge, no less — briefed the Mail on Sunday. I have my notes of a conversation I had with an excited Huhne just before his trial began. ‘Briscoe [has been] dealing with a MoS news executive called David Dillon,’ he said. She was ‘feeding the Mail information from the police investigation’, throwing the whole case against him in doubt. Huhne thought he could escape justice and save his career by proving that he was the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy, led by Tory newspapers that were out to destroy him.

Unfortunately for him, nothing altered the fact that he was guilty as charged. As he talked, a question niggled at the back of my mind: how the hell did Huhne know about the Mail on Sunday’s sources?

Now we know. First the prosecution demanded that the Mail on Sunday reveal Briscoe’s dealings with the paper. This attack on journalists’ sources at least had the merit of being authorised by an independent judge. In the confiscated emails, Briscoe mentioned she had a ‘police source’. Kent police then used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to seize all the records from David Dillon’s phone on the Mail on Sunday news desk, without the approval of a judge. All for nothing: Huhne’s allegations of a conspiracy were baseless. And all for the most trivial of reasons: the police were not using exceptional powers to investigate an exceptional crime, but a politician’s lies about a minor driving offence, which caused no injury to people or property.

The casualness of the disregard for legal standards — Eric Metcalf, a barrister specialising in freedom of speech, tells me he has no doubt that police breached Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, and the English Common Law too — shows that the possibilities for the abuse of power are limitless. Ripa not only allows the police to seize everything a modern phone can tell them about the movements and contacts of a citizen without judicial approval, but it also contains no provisions to protect the confidentiality of exchanges between journalists and their sources, doctors and patients, lawyers and clients, and MPs and constituents.

I have dwelt on the Mail on Sunday because it is one of the few among millions of instances of surveillance we know about. By chance, David Dillon noticed his name on a document which one of Huhne’s lawyers was reading in a restaurant near the Mail on Sunday’s offices. If he had not, this case, like countless others, would have remained secret. In private, the police now tell journalists that they have pulled reporters’ phone records in every single leak inquiry in the last ten years. I believe them. Why wouldn’t they, when it is so easy to spy without constraint? Meanwhile, Edward Snowden’s exposé showed that GCHQ was harvesting the cables that bring the web into Britain, taking not just email records but their contents. Gavin Millar QC and his colleagues are using the European Convention on Human Rights to discover whether the spies seized the information of journalists, lawyers and indeed MPs. A GCHQ memo Snowden passed to the Guardian quoted its managers saying their interceptions could not become public because they breached the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act.

Ah, the Human Rights Act again. Everywhere you turn, you find it unnerving the secret state. Yet the Sun and the Mail on Sunday cheer on the Tories as they threaten to repeal it. Their editors say they believe David Cameron’s promise that he will incorporate its provisions into his new British bill of rights. They are on their own on that one. As Dr Mark Elliott of Cambridge University and every other legal commentator has pointed out, Cameron wants to give rights ‘a more precise definition’. No one else believes that a government whose Home Secretary, Theresa May, wants further to restrict freedom of speech will produce a rewrite that protects, rather than degrades, the existing liberty of the citizen.

The real reason why the Sun and Mail want to drape themselves in the state’s chains, however, has nothing to do with technicalities. It is a morbid symptom of a culture war that has turned maniacal. To the right-wing press the Human Rights Act is lefty and Guardianista; it protects unpopular minorities which Conservatives loathe. The Tory press does not stop to consider that their journalists are a despised minority who also need human rights laws to defend them. The left-wing press and the BBC are no better. They stayed silent when the police arrested dozens of Sun journalists — not for hacking the phones of celebrities, but for stories from the police, prisons and armed forces which may turn out to be in the public interest. To left-wing journalists, the Tory tabloids are reviled enemies against whom any use or abuse of police power is justified. They never worry that the state will use the same tactics against them.

People go on about the might of the British press. They do not see that, consumed by hatreds and torn by civil war, it can no longer stand up for its own best interests, let alone the best interests of a free society.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/10/our-suicidal-newspapers-are-throwing-press-freedom-away/feed/53178485797featuredCrash coursehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/the-politics-of-ppe/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/the-politics-of-ppe/#commentsThu, 25 Sep 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9322492If graduates from an architecture school designed buildings that were unfit for human habitation or doctors from a university’s medical…

]]>If graduates from an architecture school designed buildings that were unfit for human habitation or doctors from a university’s medical faculty left death in their wake, their teachers would worry. The graduates of Oxford’s Politics, Philosophy and Economics course form the largest single component of the most despised generation of politicians since the Great Reform Act. Yet their old university does not show a twinge of concern.

Alex Salmond spat out ‘Westminster’ as if he meant ‘Babylon’, and every time he did, thousands of Scots decided to leave Britain. Ukip, a vehicle for another cynical demagogue, convinces its growing band of supporters that all politicians are liars (apart from Mr Farage, of course). Beyond party labels and nationalist sympathies is an ‘anti-politics mood’ that captures citizens of all beliefs and none (although ‘mood’ strikes me as too mild a world for the derision and the fury). Will Jennings of Southampton university pointed me to research which showed 80 per cent agreed with the proposition that ‘politicians are too focused on short-term chasing of headlines’, with just 3 per cent of respondents disagreeing. ‘You never see results like this,’ he said.

A remarkable number of the politicians voters despised for their tricks learnt their politics at Oxford: David Cameron, William Hague, Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt, Ed Davey, Danny Alexander. Matthew Hancock, Ed Miliband, David Miliband, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Rachel Reeves and Stuart Wood. There are more PPE graduates in the Commons than Old Etonians (35 to 20). Remember I am not talking about Oxbridge-educated politicians, who make up 50 per cent of ministers and 28 per cent of MPs, but the graduates of just one Oxford course.

Ambitious young men and women now believe they must study politics at Oxford if they want to get on in politics. And not only ambitious Brits. Christopher Hood, the editor of the only academic study of PPE, says that at one point in the last decade 5 per cent of the world’s foreign ministers had enrolled at St Antony’s — Oxford’s postgraduate college for political studies. What Oxford teaches ought to be of more than academic interest.

The French keep a jaundiced eye on the énarques, the graduates of de Gaulle’s Ecole nationale d’administration, who always seem to end at the top of business in politics whoever is in power. In Britain, however, there is little beyond protest against the ‘private school Oxbridge elite’, which fails to understand that Oxford and Cambridge are meritocratic institutions, open to all qualified students regardless of parental wealth, while private schools most assuredly are not.

Occasionally, left-wing writers have noticed that the Oxford economics department sent its rosy-cheeked charges into a wicked world without a clue about the risks of a coming crash, but you could say the same about every economics department on the planet. As Oxford is a federal university with independent colleges, I cannot see how an academic or group of politics graduates could impose a party line. That you hear occasional complaints from the right as well convinces me that none exists. (One conservative editor hands PPE graduates a remedial right-wing reading list to bang ‘sound’ thinking into their misguided young minds.)

Oxford’s issue is not what it thinks but how it thinks.

Last week Vernon Bogdanor described his astonishment that the man he called ‘my ablest pupil’ (David Cameron, PPE, Brasenose College) was drawing up a new constitution on scrap paper. You don’t rush fundamental change with barely a moment’s thought, the visibly shaken Bogdanor told the BBC. Cameron’s behaviour was ‘absurd’.

As Professor Bogdanor’s least able pupil, I hate to be the one to break it to him, but banging out ideas with barely a moment’s thought is exactly what PPE students do. They study three separate disciplines yoked into one course. In the first year, they must produce essays on John Stuart Mill one minute and parliament the next; on microeconomics, modern French history, Rousseau, Marx, formal logic, the US Congress and whether it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

‘I always invited PPE-ists to my parties,’ said Madeline Grant, who left Oxford last year. ‘They could talk about anything. Whether they knew anything did not bother them in the slightest.’

I don’t dispute that Oxford produces world-class thinkers, but it also churns out world-class bullshitters. Career politicians with no interests outside politics have always existed, as the lives of Pitt the Younger, Lloyd George and Asquith show. More novel, or more common than they once were, are politicians who believe that governing is managing; that the tactics of Peter Mandelson (PPE, St Catherine’s College) are all they need to know: lead the news cycle, write the headlines, buy off Murdoch, offer a concession to anti-immigrant feeling here, a tax-raising power to Scots there, then wait for the next wave to surf.

PPE essay crises are the perfect preparation for politicians who will distil a complicated society down to a few slogans — ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ — and confine their reading to the handful of texts that impress their peers: Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Thaler on nudging. Above all, the flightiness of PPE encourages puppeteer politicians, who stand above their society pulling the strings, rather than men and women who represent solid interests within it.

If Oxford will not split the course into separate subjects to encourage serious study, there is one small reform it could implement in compensation. It offers students the option of producing a 10,000-word dissertation. The study must be original research, and students must have a genuine interest to see them through the hard work ahead. Several told me that they and their contemporaries refused to write dissertations for these very reasons. Could not Oxford make the option compulsory and force students to concentrate on one hard topic, if only for a few months? Would it not then produce politicians who were more likely to root themselves in their country rather than skim its surface like pond-skating insects?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/the-politics-of-ppe/feed/280British Treasury Secretary Danny AlexandfeaturedThis time it’s personalhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/07/now-that-everyones-a-journalist-anyone-can-be-sued/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/07/now-that-everyones-a-journalist-anyone-can-be-sued/#commentsThu, 10 Jul 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9258391Trying to count posts on the web is like trying to number grains of sand on a beach. In June…

]]>Trying to count posts on the web is like trying to number grains of sand on a beach. In June 2012, a data management company called Domo attempted the fool’s errand nevertheless. It calculated that, every minute, the then 2.1 billion users uploaded 48 hours of YouTube video, shared 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook, published 27,778 new posts on Tumblr and sent about 100,000 tweets.

Its figures were not exhaustive and they were out of date in an instant, but for a moment they captured the explosion of self-expression the net has brought. As the European Court’s demand that Google hide writing that breaks no law shows, technological change has made finding a way to defend freedom of speech, while protecting the rights of the unjustly maligned, one of the great democratic challenges of our time.

Nowhere more so than in Britain. If you deny yourself the pleasure of browsing the celeb press, you may not heard of James Stunt. He is the husband of the Formula 1 heiress Petra Ecclestone. He cuts a swanky figure as he purrs around Mayfair in his Phantom Mansory Conquistador — a luxuriously adapted Rolls-Royce which looks like a well-upholstered Humvee. A convoy of security guards follows behind, whether Stunt is leaving his £32 million home in Belgravia or his LA mansion, which comes with a bombproof anti-terror room, parking for 100 cars, and a whole floor devoted to housing his wife’s frocks.

The Stunts are conspicuous consumers by any measure. James Stunt does not like being conspicuous in the press, however. In February, the Mail on Sunday asked whether he was a billionaire in his own right, or merely because he had secured the hand of Petra and with it the lavish trust fund her father had given her. It hired the freelance financial journalist Dominic Prince to go to Companies House. Prince reported that most of Stunt’s companies appeared to be dead or dormant. Olswang, an expensive firm of London solicitors, threatened the paper with injunctions and did the same to the Daily Mail when it picked up the story.

Maybe the newspapers had their facts wrong. Granted, if Stunt wants to sue, he should consider suing his father-in-law too. Bernie Ecclestone told the Mail that before the marriage ‘We checked James out and he wasn’t a billionaire.’ Despite the unhelpful intervention from his family, Stunt may still have a case. I won’t pretend that I care either way.

The defence of a free society is worth giving a damn about, however. The lawyers at Olswang are not bringing a standard case against a news organisation, but personally threatening Prince with actions for harassment, invasion of privacy and breach of the Data Protection Act. Stunt has the money to go ahead on all three fronts. Even though the Mail on Sunday is standing by their journalist, the threats against him have caused outrage. Private Eye is campaigning on Prince’s behalf, and it is easy to see why. If the lawyers’ new tactic of holding journalists personally liable catches on, who will want to investigate rich and litigious men and institutions? Increasingly impoverished newspapers and broadcasters may not stand by freelancers they are under no obligation to defend. The way media finances are going, they may not stand by staff either. A chill will then fall on investigative journalism. Reporters will wonder if they can risk losing what savings they possess and conclude that it is safer to write about Kim Kardashian or the weather.

The web has turned everyone into a potential journalist. Professional reporters are merely falling into the same exposed position as the millions tweeting, posting and blogging online: becoming as easy to intimidate as an activist typing on a tablet on his kitchen table.

In theory, the government has responded well to the democratisation of publishing. Those who fall into easy cynicism, and say that a crooked political class rigs the system to suit its friends, should examine the Defamation Act of 2013. Public-spirited politicians from all parties gave new defences to writers and allowed courts to throw out claims from vengeful litigants who had suffered no serious harm. But the coalition sidelined the urgent issue of money. An investigative journalist, or a blogger with an important story to tell, can spend tens of thousands just on lawyers’ letters and consultations. If the case goes to trial, Oxford University found the cost of defending a libel claim in an English court was up to 140 times higher than the European average.

Only very rich or very brave publishers will risk facing cost orders of £1 million or more if they defend what they have written and lose. The web has allowed mass publishing. But the law continues to impose a money bar on justice.

Two years ago, the coalition appeared ready to tear the bar down. When he was justice minister, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord McNally was discussing whether to ensure that the economical county courts heard most libel cases. They already hear most demands for compensation for damage to property; they should decide on damage to reputation too. But McNally left the Justice Ministry. Lord Faulks — a QC, I can’t help but notice — replaced him. Lord Lester, a great liberal proponent of justice for all, asked what had happened to the plan to cut the cost of justice. The coalition was ‘still considering the way forward’, Faulks replied.

The government’s dawdling is intolerable. There is no such thing as ‘the press’ any more. Everyone who blogs, tweets and posts, and everyone who is blogged, tweeted and posted about, needs a fair and above all cheap method of settling disputes. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right because other rights depend on the citizen’s ability to argue without coercive constraints.

The way to protect it in the 21st century is to understand that justice is not merely a system designed to provide fees for libel silks and Olswang’s partners. Access to it should not depend on whether you are a rich Stunt.

Listen

I have looked everywhere. I have Googled, and asked around. But I can find no evidence that Steve Coogan has ever taken the trouble to defend freedom of speech at home or abroad.

I promised myself I would never again mock ‘luvvies’ in politics after I saw Tim Minchin, Dave Gorman, Robin Ince and Dara Ó Briain give up their time to help Index on Censorship’s campaign against Britain’s repressive libel laws. Steve Coogan did not stand alongside them. I have heard Sir Ian McKellen and Sienna Miller protest at Index events in defence of the Belarus Free Theatre, which must ward off the attentions of the Lukashenko dictatorship. But I have never heard a squeak from Coogan.

He lobbies for Hacked Off, which started with a good case against abuses of press power, but degenerated into know-nothing, single-issue fanaticism long ago. Coogan’s record means that a short press release caused lifelong liberals to consider resigning from Index last week. It was ‘delighted to announce’ that Coogan had agreed to become Index’s patron. Coogan was equally delighted as he believed that ‘creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished’.

This was news to me and many others, who had seen Hacked Off become like the tabloids it opposed. Listen for the familiar hectoring voice, and the routine dismissal of contrary opinions as stupid and corrupt in his assault on David Mitchell last year. His fellow comedian had said in the Observer that liberal hatred of Murdoch was not a good enough reason to tear up basic protections. Rather than argue, Coogan jeered. ‘Despite your ubiquity, you are consistently well above average,’ he said as he dismissed Mitchell’s comedy with the condescension sneering men mistake for wit. Mitchell’s argument against giving politicians unprecedented power to regulate the press, however, was so dumb he could not even patronise it. Mitchell was producing ‘ill-informed and superficial dross’. He was doing the work of press barons. Mitchell’s warnings were ‘astonishing’ and ‘sloppy’. He was a ‘schoolboy’ miles out of his depth.

Still Mitchell, dross-churning schoolboy that he was, could count on the support of Index on Censorship. Parliament’s charter on press regulation undermines the fundamental principle that the press holds politicians to account, it said. ‘Politicians have now stepped in as ringmaster and our democracy is tarnished as a result.’ Events were to show that the politicians could not wait to start cracking the whip. When Telegraph reporters asked about her expenses, an aide for Maria Miller, the former culture secretary, warned them that she was responsible for press regulation and they had better watch what they said.

No one had the right to be surprised. Give politicians the power to influence what writers say about them and they will use it. Even schoolboys know that.

Beyond Parliament’s creation of the first mechanism for political surveillance of the written word in peacetime since the 1690s, there is a more subtle assault on investigative journalism. News organisations that do not sign up to an approved regulator face exemplary damages in the courts, even if they win a libel or a privacy case. J.K. Rowling and other Hacked Off supporters have provided the funds to set up a regulator called Impress. (Geddit?) If the government recognises it, newspapers and magazines will face punitive punishments if they refuse to join, which will kill small journals and deter larger ones from tackling dangerous stories.

Meanwhile, Leveson ruled that police officers tempted to blow the whistle must raise concerns internally rather than speak to journalists. Index on Censorship warned at the time that the lock-down showed how the hacking scandal had heightened the appetite for secrecy. Once again, events have vindicated it. From forces disciplining police officers for tweeting to Parliament approving secret trials, the state has been ‘shackling information’, just as Indexpredicted it would.

Why is it now embracing Coogan? Its chief executive, Jodie Ginsberg, told me that as an ‘edgy’ comedian he understood the need to confront oppressive power, although she could not point to any instances of him making his opposition public. I think a better explanation lies in understanding how hard it is to defend free speech. It is a warts-and-all liberty. If you are not prepared to be unpopular, if you are not prepared to come to the aid of people you and your friends find repugnant, you should not pretend to support it.

Many do not. Liberty, the largest civil liberties organisation in Britain, ignores free speech. Liberty’s illiberalism does not matter overmuch. Free speech had English PEN and Index on Censorship in the trench alongside it. PEN can take the strain, but it has been hard for Index to bear. Look at the liberal worthies Hacked Off has managed to persuade to support a medieval royal charter imposed by the feudal remnant of the privy council: Danny Boyle, Tom Stoppard, David Attenborough, Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett, Philip Pullman, Ian McEwan, Helen Fielding, John Cleese, and A.S. Byatt.

They would not be the first people I would call on to investigate accusations of police corruption, but they are good men and women nevertheless. The older among them harbour the easy illusion that the right-wing press ruined their country by brainwashing the working class into supporting Margaret Thatcher. All of them believe with more plausibility that the behaviour of many editors and journalists has been despicable. I know a few of them and they will never believe that they are making a terrible mistake. I know too that liberals yearn to be their friends and overlook their occasional errors, as do I in my weaker moments. Better to stay friends than to oppose your own side in bitter public arguments and stand alongside Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre as you do it.

Index, once one of Europe’s most important free-speech organisations, is facing a financial as well as a social crisis. It has made its best people redundant and abandoned its sponsorship of Belarussian journalists. David Aaronovitch, its chairman, said its ‘campaign against state involvement in the regulation of the press almost certainly cost us donors’. His chief executive tells me its opposition to Hacked Off remains unchanged. I wonder if it can be. Henceforth Hacked Off will be able to say: ‘Index can’t believe that we are threatening free speech. We are such good friends now, it has made Steve Coogan its patron.’

There is a grand sense of intellectual independence in E.M. Forster’s line that he would rather betray his country than betray his friends. The truth for many London intellectuals is shabbier. When they have to choose between betraying their principles and betraying their friends, their principles go into the bin.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/06/since-when-has-steve-coogan-stood-against-censorship/feed/114The Trip to Italy Screening - Sundance London Film And Music Festival 2014featuredA guy named Mohttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/05/a-guy-named-mo/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/05/a-guy-named-mo/#commentsThu, 15 May 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9206741If a curious stranger asked you to name a British Muslim commentator, I guess you would name Mo Ansar. So…

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If a curious stranger asked you to name a British Muslim commentator, I guess you would name Mo Ansar. So omnipresent has he become, he seems at times to be Britain’s only Muslim commentator.

‘Mo Ansar: Open for business,’ read his first tweet on 8 August 2011, and business has been rolling in ever since. Ansar understands better than most that if you want to exploit the media you must always be available to harassed researchers on rolling news programmes. ‘He invented himself as a rent-a-quote commentator,’ says the LBC broadcaster Iain Dale. ‘We know he’ll always say “yes”. And when you’re setting up a topic, that’s worth its weight in gold.’ A producer recalled marvelling as Ansar bombarded him with ideas for films. ‘This man wants to be on television more than anything else in the world,’ he thought.

Until recently programme makers were happy to oblige. Broadcasters made him the voice of British Islam, even though no electorate had voted for him, and no organisation had appointed him its spokesperson. Ansar was not an Islamic scholar. He had not published a book or led a movement. He was a planning manager at Lloyds-TSB in Winchester until 2006, and has had no visible means of support except appearance fees and state benefits for years.

He looked the part, I’ll give him that. He dressed in a prayer hat and flowing robes, but spoke with a slight London accent: a mixture of the exotic and the familiar broadcasters appreciated. More tellingly, he was among the first to understand that Twitter could turn you into a minor celebrity. Ansar has issued tens of thousands of Tweets: picking fights, issuing proclamations, and seeking endorsements. Alongside the official Mo Ansar account, there is a Twitter alias – a ‘sockpuppet’ account in the jargon – called @The_TruthTeller, which denigrates Ansar’s enemies. It was originally called @MoAnsar2, and is written either by Ansar, who was unavailable for comment, or by a besotted fan determined to fight his every battle.

If those battles were just with racists, then Ansar would not now be wondering if he is yesterday’s man, Although Ansar does not need bodyguards, he will know from experience that the popular right-wing view that anti-Muslim prejudice barely exists is a fairy story. Ansar came to prominence in 2011 when the English Defence League was at its height. He has enemies any man should be proud to call his own. But they are not his only enemies.

The greatest cause of confusion in liberal Europe is the existence of two far-rights: the nativist white far-right, which hates and targets Muslims because they are Muslim; and the religious far right, which hates and targets critics of fundamentalism, including critics who are liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims. Ansar deplores the former. His attitude towards the latter is equivocal to put it politely.

I first saw the immoderate side of the media’s ‘moderate Muslim’ after Tom Holland published In the Shadow of Sword, a history of early Islam, which dismissed its its founding myths. ‘It takes some guts to do that,’ I thought. True to form, Ansar toured the TV studios denouncing Holland as a fraud. Holland challenged the ‘expert’ to name the first Muslim philosopher to condemn slavery. Ansar did not know but came up with a Boko-Haramish defence of slavery in Muslim states: ‘If slaves are treated justly, with full rights, and no oppression whatsoever… why would anyone object, Tom?’

Like so many on the white far Right, Ansar has Jews on the brain. To him, David Miliband is the ‘Zionist Jew Miliband,’ while he will pass on his crackpot theory that Jesus was not a Jew to anyone who will listen. To look only at Ansar’s ideology is to look the wrong way, however. Media exposure gives some a huge adrenalin rush. The broadcasters’ attention makes you feel important. It turns you into a minor celebrity, a man of consequence. And yet at the back of your mind you must realise that opinion formers are like newsreaders, supporting actors or any other semi-skilled worker. Thousands could do their jobs just as well. Without valuable skills or a mass following, the haunting question ‘Why me?’ has no compelling answer.

If producers dropped Mo Ansar, he would have nothing to fall back on. He would become what those who have felt the thrill of fame fear most: just another face in the street. Some minor celebrities respond to insecurity by being brittle and melancholic off camera. Others go on the attack. No one has experienced Ansar ‘s fury like the men who have threatened his career as an ‘opinion former’.

The case that turns Ansar from a chancer into something more sinister is the case Maajid Nawaz. The Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate and director of the moderate Muslim think-tank, Quilliam, made Ansar look like a fool in the BBC documentary When Tommy Met Mo. Ansar was to show Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League that his prejudices about Islam were wrong. A wiser and better Robinson would then renounce extremist politics.

Nawaz challenged Ansar’s claim to be a moderate. Did he agree that thieves should have their hands chopped off? ‘No’, Ansar replied. Nawaz understands Islamism better than most interviewers, and did not stop there. Should an Islamic state cut off the hands of thieves or stone adulterers? ‘I’ll tell you my answer “no”. What’s yours?’ The cornered Ansar could only waffle.

Robinson realised that Nawaz was the authentic moderate. He left the EDL, but he left at the behest of Quilliam, and announced his conversion at a Quilliam press conference. Nawaz reduced Ansar to the role of bit player at what was meant to be HIS triumph.

Earlier this year he had his revenge after an argument about the cartoon strip Jesus and Mo. It is a sign of how neurotic our society has become that the supposedly controversial cartoon featured Jesus saying ‘Hey’ and Muhammad saying ‘How ya doing?’. The tameness of the image – its meek and anodyne mildness – did not stop religious reactionaries going for Nawaz when he tweeted the cartoon, and said it did not offend him. A fellow Liberal Democrat called Mohammed Shafiq accused him of ‘denigration of the prophet,’ a charge which can lead to assassination by freelance fanatics anywhere or death at the hands of the state in Pakistan and other Muslim-majority countries. Ansar joined the campaign against Nawaz with full-throated enthusiasm. Nicky Campbell, who had had Ansar on his Radio 5 show scores of times, warned, ‘take care you don’t come over as whipping this up my friend’. Ansar took no notice.

Nawaz received death threats, and had to call in the police. For Ansar to go along with a campaign, which was at best indifferent to his safety and the safety of his family in Pakistan, was unforgiveable. ‘Can I go to Pakistan now?’ he asks when I speak to him. ‘Will a mob or the government try to kill me? Will someone try to kill me here?’ Needless to add, his contempt for Ansar is absolute.

Others are not far behind. Nicky Campbell dropped him from his show. Abusive tweets and texts followed. Iain Dale dropped him from LBC for the less high-minded reason that Ansar had missed scheduled interviews. They had a Twitter row, which ended with Dale calling Ansar ‘a gobby prick’ and Ansar accusing Dale of subjecting him ‘to anti-Muslim prejudice’. He implied that only this prejudice could explain why Dale had barred him from his show. The next thing Dale knew Ansar had reported him to Hampshire Police and Tell Mama, which monitors crimes against Muslim. He produced no evidence that substantiated the charge that Dale was a racist or Islamaphobe, and both dismissed the complaint.

His vindictiveness and self-regard will be his undoing. Broadcasters are a tolerant bunch. But they take exception to guests who try to set the cops on them. BBC Radio 5 will not have him on. Meanwhile everyone in commercial radio knows Iain Dale’s story. Maybe the Russian and Iranian propaganda channels will return his calls. Apart from that, it’s over.

We should not forget Mo Ansar, however. For all the talk of ‘diversity,’ we live in an era of uniformity. Instead of recognising the vast range of views within British Islam, officialdom created a monolithic bloc ‘the Muslims’. It then decided that self-appointed and invariably reactionary voices should be ‘the Muslims’ sole representatives.

Maajid Nawaz calls official British attitudes ‘neo-colonial’. To understand why white readers should ask how they would feel if the broadcasters pushed forward a white Mo Ansar, and said without a shred of evidence that he was the authentic voice of white Britain. Admit it, you would feel patronised and disgusted.

]]>Firoozeh Bazrafkan is frightened of nothing. Five foot tall, 31 years old, and so thin you think a puff of wind could blow her away, she still has the courage to be a truly radical artist and challenge those who might hurt her. She fights for women’s rights and intellectual freedom, and her background means her fight has to be directed against radical Islam. As a Danish citizen, she saw journalists go into hiding and mobs attack her country’s embassies just because Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammad that were so tame you could hardly call them ‘satirical’. Bazrafkan is also the daughter of an Iranian family, and the Islamic Republic’s subjugation of women revolts her.

When I met her, she was enduring a crash course in politically correct Europe’s many hypocrisies. White Danes reported her to the police for writing that Muslim men abuse and murder their daughters, and adding for good measure that the ‘Koran is more immoral, deplorable and crazy than manuals of the two other global religions combined’.

You could say that her remarks were offensive. You could say that the inattentive reader might just take them to mean that all Muslim men abuse and murder their daughters. But if every remark that someone might find offensive or misinterpret were banned, the human race would fall silent.

Liberal principles once held that the Danish state should only punish Bazrafkan if her words provoked violence. As it was, the court asked for no proof of actual incitement. (There was none to be had.) Instead, it acted as if criticism of religion — a system of beliefs which individuals should be free to choose and others should be free to criticise — was identical to racial prejudice, which all thinking people condemn because no one can choose his or her ethnicity. The white ‘liberal’ judges therefore ruled that the Iranian-born artist was a ‘racist’ and gave her a criminal record for condemning honour killings and clerical misogyny — proving yet again that the interests of women always come last.

When I asked what she thought of the Danish legal system, I did not receive a long lecture on freedom of expression.

‘I think it’s fucked,’ she said.

So is the London art world. After she told the Danish court she would sooner go to prison than pay its 5,000 kroner (£550) fine, the indomitable Bazrafkan headed for Passion for Freedom. The annual exhibition is as close as London gets to underground art. That claim may surprise you. If you listen to artists, writers, academics and journalists, you would think that thousands of them operate in a radical underground. They say the right things. They ‘speak truth to power’, ‘transgress boundaries’, and all the rest of it. But you will have noticed that they are careful only to challenge religions that won’t hurt them (Christianity) and governments that won’t arrest them (democracies). The London-based Polish intellectuals who organise this artistic protest against abuses of human rights are braver. Passion for Freedom is not devoted to anti-Islamist art. But its curators are not frightened to show it either.

The exhibition was to open at London’s Unit 24 gallery, near Tate Modern, last Saturday. Unit 24, which boasts on its website that it is ‘fiercely independent’, pulled out with only days to go. In emails to the organisers, Unit 24 offered various justifications for wrecking a show that had taken months to arrange. ‘Enemies of the exhibition’ had made threats, and it was worried about a ‘potential terrorist attack’. Unit 24 told The Spectator it pulled the show because Passion for Freedom could not provide insurance and security.

There was no secret about its decision. But not one of the arts correspondents for the broadsheets or BBC covered the threat to an international exhibition featuring the work of dozens of artists. I have argued many times that censorship is at its most effective when no one admits it exists. The first step to freeing yourself from oppressive power is to find the courage to admit that you are afraid. The more people confess to being afraid, the less reason there is to fear and the easier it is to isolate repressive forces.

But the radical poses of western intellectuals make a frank discussion of fear impossible. For how can they say they are brave dissidents one minute, and confess they are scared of theocratic thugs the next? In 2007, Grayson Perry was an exception. He said he would damn Christianity in his art, but had ‘not gone all out attacking Islamism because I feel the real fear that someone will slit my throat’. By the time of his Reith lecture last week, Perry’s honesty had gone. On the subject of courage, he could only quip, ‘I think one of the most rebellious acts done by an artist recently was by Tracey Emin. She supported the Tories!’

Ha-bloody-ha. How the audience laughed. But Perry knew what he said was not true, and so in their hearts did the claque who applauded him.

Fortunately, the truly radical owners of the Embassy Tea Gallery allowed the rebellious show to take over their space in Southwark, where it will run until Friday. The large crowd on the opening night cheered Firoozeh Bazrafkan. Meanwhile, the judges decided that the best piece on display was ‘The Perfect Stone’ by Victoria Burgher. A smiling woman gave visitors stones as they entered. ‘Find where to put it,’ she said with a conspiratorial wink. Galleries pull stunts like this all the time. In this instance, however, visitors found that the stone went into a sack by a pillar. Above it was Article 104 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, which states with creepy precision that when a woman is stoned to death for adultery, ‘the stone shall not be so big so as to kill the person by one or two strikes, neither shall it be so small that it cannot be called a stone’.

I was one of the judges that gave Burgher the prize for her subtle protest against the Iran’s treatment of women. I suppose that means I am a racist too.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/portraits-in-cowardice/feed/353Tracey Emin Unveils Her New Exhibition At The Turner Contemporary In MargatefeaturedPCs gone madhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/pcs-gone-mad/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/pcs-gone-mad/#commentsThu, 24 Oct 2013 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9064781Just before the hacking scandal broke, the Sun sent a young and by all accounts decent reporter to meet a…

]]>Just before the hacking scandal broke, the Sun sent a young and by all accounts decent reporter to meet a woman who said she had a story — a ‘walk-in’ as we call them in the trade.

The walk-in produced a phone and said the Sun would want to take a look. One picture on it showed the face of a much-loved TV presenter. The rest of the celeb’s body was more lustful than lovable, however, as he was exposing his member in triumphant fashion. Accompanying the picture was a lot of explicit sex talk. The phone looked as if it belonged to the star’s mistress, and the very famous and very married presenter had been sending her pornographic ‘selfies’ and sex texts to remind her of the joys that awaited her when they next met.

The reporter took the phone. Contrary to received wisdom, tabloid hacks are not all monsters. He told the Sun’s lawyer he suspected his contact had stolen the phone. He and the lawyers killed the story. He gave the phone back to the walk-in. Later the police arrested and cautioned her under the Theft Act, and returned the phone to its rightful owner.

That seemed to be that. The reporter moved on to another job as a foreign correspondent in the States. The petty thief had only a tiny mark on her criminal record that hardly anyone would know about. The celebrity continued to keep his sex life private.

It was as if nothing had happened, until three years later in 2012 the police arrested the reporter for possession of criminal property and a catch-all offence that could trap every investigative journalist — ‘computer misuse’ — a charge without a public interest defence. He lost his job and his new life in America. Like scores of other journalists and confidential sources — more now than ever before in British history — he is waiting to see if the Crown Prosecution Service will send him to the dock.

If it does, it will show how stupid Britain’s forces of law and order have become. I hear that the CPS is trying to keep the celeb’s name secret, but there is no guarantee that it can. If it fails, the state, which accuses the tabloids of invading the privacy of the famous, will be invading his privacy itself. The reporter, meanwhile, will face a full criminal hearing, even though the police let off the actual thief with a caution. In the 1990s, I published a collection of essays called Cruel Britannia on the early Blair years. I chose as my subtitle ‘Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous’. What applied then, applies now — only doubly so.

Britain’s authorities are sinister because they are turning on fundamental liberties, without which a free society cannot function: freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to protest. They are preposterous because they are wasting their time and our money on crimes that turn out not to be crimes on closer examination. Instead of keeping a steady head, they pander to popular hysteria and round up despised minorities: left-wing demonstrators, tabloid journalists and the politically incorrect users of social media. It is as if the criminal justice system has become a vast job creation scheme for cops and briefs. Or perhaps the better comparison is with the Aztec gods, who needed a steady flow of sacrificial victims to satiate their hunger. It certainly feels that way when I talk to honest men and women caught in the law’s maw.

‘Don’t they have anything better to do?’ used to be the question when the police were caught wasting their own time. The surprising answer today is that often they do not.

Crime is falling across the developed world. Sociologists cannot say why. Tougher punishments do not explain the trend. The punitive United States has two million in custody, and has seen its crime rate collapse. But so have the soft-liberal states of northern Europe. The authors of the best-selling Freakonomics claimed that freely available abortion had led to poor women aborting boys, who would otherwise have grown up to be criminals. Their eugenic fantasy had no basis in fact either — crime rates were lower when abortion was illegal. The right’s warning that ‘the collapse of the family’ would lead to social breakdown has proved to be as false — crime has fallen as single parenthood has grown. The left’s warning that inequality and poverty will bring disorder on the streets has turned out to be nonsense too — the crime figures keep going down despite the worst recession in a century. Better car immobilisers, security cameras and burglar alarms are probably part of the explanation, as are an ageing population and more humane treatments for the mentally ill and disabled.

For whatever reason — and even the pacifying effects of unleaded petrol have been suggested — the developed world is going through a cultural change as dramatic as the shift in the mid-19th century when the Victorians rejected the licentiousness of the Georgians and embraced respectability. The ‘young people of today’, so often condemned, are less likely to get drunk or stoned than their parents were, and much less likely to burgle your home or rob you in the street. Saffy, Jennifer Saunders’s puritanical daughter in Absolutely Fabulous, is as much a sign of the times as a comic character.

There are two ways to respond to the news that crime has halved in England and Wales since 1995. The public could rejoice that last year we enjoyed the largest fall in violent crime in Europe over the last decade. A safer society is a society worth having, after all. For the police, however, a safer society is a clear and present danger. Crime may have halved since 1995, but police numbers are up: from 127,222 to 129,584 in 2012 in England and Wales; and from 14,323 in to 17,436 in Scotland. How can these officers justify their salaries and pensions, when so many are surplus to requirements? The answer the police have found is to criminalise behaviour that was never criminal in the past and should not be criminal now.

We will have to wait until the trials are over, but from what I am hearing the phone hacking cases stand a good chance of being remembered as the most vexatious litigation in English legal history. They are already the largest and most expensive police investigation ever. That on its own is an astonishing fact. Britain’s largest police investigation — costing £19.5 million as of June this year, the last month for which we have figures — was not into murder or paedophilia or terrorism but into journalism. Detectives have arrested more than 100 journalists and their sources to date. Only countries like Iran and Turkey arrest reporters in such number, and for this reason alone the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service will be as much on trial as the defendants.

I urge you to keep your eyes open for two tricks they may have pulled when the hearings begin. Off the record, I am told that many reporters charged with paying for stories — of ‘procuring misconduct in public office’ as the archaic wording of the common law has it — will say, ‘Yes, I paid for information but the story I received was in the public interest.’ If they do, they will tell us that the authorities took advantage of an outbreak of moral hysteria — which, as Lord Macaulay noted, periodically make the British so ridiculous — to punish whistle-blowers and send a chilling message to all state servants that they will receive the same treatment if they speak out.

You should watch out too for cases so trivial and pointless that you wonder about the mentality of the prosecutor who approved them. A reporter I know has been kept on bail for months for an off-the-cuff remark he made in an email and because he worked near a man who was an alleged hacker. If they come to court, these prosecutions will send journalists rather than sources a message. ‘We can make your lives hell, for years,’ they will say. ‘Are you sure you want to go through all of that?’

Too few realise that the police have every-thing they need, because, to save his worthless skin, and the skin of his equally worthless son James, Rupert Murdoch handed over all the evidence, however flimsy, for detectives to use against his own journalists and supposedly confidential sources.

Despite promises from the Director of Public Prosecutions to the contrary, the web remains an equally profitable source of material for underemployed officers. Kent police, for instance, investigated their own youth commissioner — a luckless 17-year-old called Paris Brown — for making allegedly racist and homophobic tweets. In this, as in so many other investigations into ‘hate speech’, the fundamental principle of free societies was forgotten. It is not enough for the state to say that speech is hateful: it should have to show that the offending words would incite violence before our underemployed cops can investigate. If a religious fanatic is inciting a mob outside a gay bar, arrest him, of course. If he is expressing an obnoxious opinion, argue with him.

Just in case you are thinking it is only Sun reporters, ‘bigots’ and other traditional objects of leftish antipathy who are suffering, notice how the police boast of mass arrests at left-wing demonstrations and only months later admit sotto voce that they have made a mistake. The most notable climbdown came from protests against the G20 in 2009, when the Met had to accept that its arrests were unlawful. More often, they just quietly release innocent protestors without charge.

We should be enjoying a peace dividend as crime falls. We should be a happier country, freed from fear. Instead we are becoming a frightened and cautious people. The devil has found work for the police’s idle hands, and they are meddling with the freedoms that make democratic life worth living.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/pcs-gone-mad/feed/98Spect_Copper_TwitfeaturedForget ‘militant’ atheists. Fight the real fanaticshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/08/forget-about-richard-dawkins-fight-the-real-fanatics/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/08/forget-about-richard-dawkins-fight-the-real-fanatics/#commentsThu, 22 Aug 2013 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9000431It’s August, and you are a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head. What to write?…

]]>It’s August, and you are a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head. What to write? What to do? Your empty mind brings you nothing but torment, until a thought strikes you, ‘I know, I’ll do Richard Dawkins.’

Dawkins is the sluggish pundit’s dream. It does not matter which paper you work for. Editors of all political persuasions and none will take an attack on Darwin’s representative on earth. With the predictability of the speaking clock, Owen Jones, the Peter Hitchens of the left, thinks the same as Craig Brown, Private Eye’s high Tory satirist. Tom Chivers, the Telegraph’s science blogger, says the same as Andrew Brown, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent. The BBC refuses to run contrary views. It assures the nation that ‘militant’ atheism is as fanatical as militant religion — despite the fact that no admirer of The God Delusion has ever planted a bomb, or called for the murder of homosexuals, Jews and apostates.

Sharp operators could sell the same piece a dozen times without changing a word. Read the papers, and you will suspect that is exactly what sharp operators have done.

Cultural conservatives have always hated Dawkins for challenging traditional Christian beliefs. The liberal-left is fine with knocking Christianity, but it hates Dawkins for being intellectually consistent and tweeting — yes, that’s right, tweeting — against Islam too. Many of the charges against his inappropriate tweets are extraordinary. Jones denounces Dawkins for tweeting ‘Who the hell do these Muslims think they are? At UCL of all places, tried to segregate the sexes in debate’. If Jones can’t see what is wrong with segregation, then not even an equality course for beginners can save him.

But let me try to be fair. Dawkins has also tweeted against all Muslims — not just sexist god-botherers at University College London. I accept that generalising about Muslims can incite racism. It is all very well atheists saying that religion is not the same as race, because you are free to decide what god if any you believe in, but cannot choose your ethnicity. But try telling that to the persecuted Christians, Shia and Sunni of the Middle East. Their religious persecution is no different from racial persecution. I would go further and concede that Dawkins’s critics had other arguments that weren’t wholly asinine, were it not for a telling detail. They never stick their necks out and defend real liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims who are being persecuted in Britain right now.

They stay silent because they are frightened of breaking with the crowd, of the faint threat of Islamist retaliation, and of absurd accusations of racism. Journalists want the easy life. They want targets who cannot hurt them. Dawkins has never hurt a fly, so he’s all right. Looked at in a certain light, however, the enemies of Nahla Mahmoud might not be.

I have picked on her, not because her case is unusual, but because it is so typical. She is a Sudanese refugee who became a leading figure in the British Council of ex-Muslims. Earlier this year Channel 4 gave her one minute and 39 seconds precisely to talk about the evils of Britain’s Sharia courts in Britain. In these institutions, a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s, a man can divorce his wife by simple repudiation, and women who remarry lose custody of their children. One minute and 39 seconds may not sound long enough to list their vices. But it is one minute and 39 seconds longer than the BBC has ever given her.

Nahla described how she grew up under Sharia. She was ‘always dealt with as a second-class citizen, always bought up to believe that I am an incomplete human being [who] needed a man as a guard.’

She was shocked to find the same system here in her land of refuge. ‘Muslims have been living in Britain for hundreds of years and never needed sharia courts,’ she concluded. ‘Everyone should have equal rights and live under one secular law.’

She and her family have suffered for her simple moral clarity. Salah Al Bander, a leading figure in the Cambridge Liberal Democrats, went for her. (I was going to write, ‘who, surprisingly, is a leading figure in the Cambridge Liberal Democrats’ — but given the Liberal Democrats’ awful attitudes towards women and Jews, nothing they do surprises me anymore.)

Al Bander posted an article in Arabic on the Sudanese Online website (one of the most widely read sites in Sudan and throughout the Sudanese diaspora). He called her a ‘Kafira’ (unbeliever) who was sowing discord. These are words with consequences — particularly when Al Bander added, ‘I will not forgive anyone who wants to start a battle against Islam and the beliefs of the people…’ After mosques and Sudanese newspapers took up the campaign against her, religious thugs attacked her brother and terrified her mother. Nahla told me she is now ‘very careful when I go out’.

I understand that the Cambridge Liberal Democrats have had an inquiry and decided that Al Bander’s words were misinterpreted. My point is that women like Nahla are being terrified and abused every day in Britain. I have seen Richard Dawkins speak up for them as a matter of honour and a matter of course many times, but have never heard a peep of protest from his opponents.

One day there will be a reckoning. One day, thousands who have suffered genital mutilation, religious threats and forced marriages will turn to the intellectual and political establishments of our day and ask why they did not protect them. The pathetic and discreditable reply can only be: ‘We were too busy fighting Richard Dawkins to offer you any support at all.’

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/08/forget-about-richard-dawkins-fight-the-real-fanatics/feed/792Artist Jan Fabre Honoured in University of AntwerpfeaturedA little bird told me…http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/how-social-media-helps-authoritarians/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/how-social-media-helps-authoritarians/#respondThu, 06 Jun 2013 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=8927001Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said…

]]>Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about?

I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the lobby filled me in on a story which had been doing the rounds for months. I even know which law stopped the Mail on Sunday following the basics of journalism and giving its readers the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. (Although with most affairs the ‘whys’ are self-evident. It is the ‘whos’ and, for the voyeuristic, the ‘whats’ and the ‘hows’ that stir the blood.) I cannot say any more in print. I cannot even tell you which restriction on freedom of speech is stopping publication. If I did, you might just be able to work out the names of the lovers.

If I or another journalist or lawyer met you in a pub, however, we would gossip, as people do. You would discover that the Mail on Sunday exaggerated, and the affair is not ‘dynamite’. It does no more than confirm existing impressions about the tawdriness and narrowness of our elite.

This is the way it always was before the web. By the time the rumour had run its course, a few thousand people would know the truth. The authorities could not have punished miscreants if they had tried. To prove that X had whispered to Y about the infidelities of Z, they would have needed spies in every bar and bugs on every phone. The surveillance required would have not only been illiberal but beyond the capacity of the state.

Now the old world of gatekeepers and inside information seems to have gone the way of bowler hats and three-piece suits. After the Mail on Sunday published, Facebook and Twitter were full of people who claimed to know the identities of the adulterous couple. The days when our rulers could order secrecy, and be sure that most people would remain in ignorance, are over. Social media allows everyone to join the conversation. The new world is like a pub that is open to all. Anyone can hear the chatter.

I have always been wary of utopian burblings about how the web will free humanity. But no sceptic can ignore the liberating role of Twitter, not just in minor Westminster scandals but in the Turkish protests and other great events. If it achieves nothing else, the Turkish uprising ought to shatter the respect for the clueless western commentators, who told us that Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a living example of that much heralded but rarely spotted beast, ‘the moderate Islamist’. Erdogan’s soothingly named ‘Justice and Development Party’ has not brought justice or let free speech develop. More journalists are under arrest in Turkey than in any other country. The state and its crony media proprietors limit what journalists can report. But when the mainstream media blocked news of the demonstrations, Twitter stepped in. Citizens sent two million tweets about the protests in the first 24 hours. Erdogan paid the new technologies the highest compliment imaginable when he described Twitter as a ‘new menace’ — on a par with secularism and alcohol.

This all sounds marvellous, and in many ways it is marvellous. There is a catch, however. Everyone who tweets provides evidence that the authorities can use against them — evidence that in the past would have been next to impossible to find. You don’t have to look at Turkey, or indeed Iran or China, to find examples of social media opening up new possibilities to spy and control. You can get all of that at home.

I have always been wary about those who liken democracies to dictatorships. People who shout about ‘ZanuLabour’ or the ‘EUSSR’ sound like spoilt children who have lived over-sheltered lives. But it remains the case that the techniques of censorship are the same the world over: only their intensity varies. In our case, the internet might have pushed Britain towards American-style liberalism, or the authorities might have treated Twitter conversations like pub talk. Instead they have welcomed the opportunities new technologies give them to monitor and punish. ‘Last year in England and Wales, 653 people faced criminal charges related to their activity on social media,’ reported a stunned Washington Post correspondent on 1 June. Britain, he went on to remind US readers, has ‘no broad protection for freedom of speech’.

The emancipatory effects of the global village are thus double-edged. The global villagers can find out more, but so can the global village policeman. To put it another way, the authorities can prosecute anyone who tweeted the names of the mysterious couple in the Mail on Sunday (who I am not allowed to mention) for breaking a law (which I cannot tell you about either). If the recent past is a guide, they just might.

Listen to Nick Cohen discuss this article with Paul Staines on this week’s View from 22 (12:15)

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/how-social-media-helps-authoritarians/feed/0mailfeaturedLeveson: Don’t let the state frighten youhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/leveson-dont-let-the-state-frighten-you/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/leveson-dont-let-the-state-frighten-you/#respondTue, 26 Mar 2013 13:10:13 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=8872491 If David Cameron had any sense, he would stand up in the Commons and say “I am withdrawing the…

If David Cameron had any sense, he would stand up in the Commons and say

“I am withdrawing the Royal Charter. The law officers have assured me that Lord Justice Leveson, though a fine judge in many respects, did not understand the Human Rights Act. He failed to see that the courts would almost certainly find that his plans to force newspapers and websites to join his regulator by hitting them with punitive fines were unlawful in practice. My problem is that too many in Parliament cannot see it either.

“There is a madness here in Westminster; a fanaticism which I, as a traditional Tory, find distasteful. I do not like officials in the Department of Culture Media and Sport drawing up lists of who must submit to censorship – the Angling Times, no, Hello! Magazine, yes, student newspapers, no, local newspapers, yes, “small-scale blogs,” no, medium-or-above-scale blogs,” yes. It’s not just that these pronouncements may have no legal force, it will be up to the courts to decide how interpret the legislation, I am worried that British civil servants are sounding like officials in a banana republic producing a list of targets that the regime must monitor and those it can safely ignore..

“I don’t regret seeking all-party agreement. There’s nothing wrong with looking for consensus. But politicians have been caught up in a giddy rush to escape from the reality that legislating on free speech is hard and dangerous, the work of years. I once said that “the next big scandal waiting to happen” is lobbying. Well we’re having that now. Hacked Off, will not name its backers. It will not say whether they include British or foreign oligarchs who want to shut down investigative journalism. Yet it sat in the Leader of the Opposition’s offices, munching pizza and drawing up legislation in the middle of the night. I accept I should have supported the leader of opposition when he denounced the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. But since then, I have lost respect for him. He’s shown himself to be a weak leader, the plaything of special interests.

“I am struck how the Guardian, Spectator, Private Eye, New Statesman, Economist and Financial Times, have all expressed alarm. None of these papers were criticised by the Leveson inquiry. The Guardian indeed provided the stories which led to the Leveson inquiry.

“I am more struck by the fear that is spreading through websites, blogs, local newspapers and small magazines, which once again have broken no laws. I don’t like people being frightened about what they write. Writers should not be frightened about what they write in a free country as long they write within the law.

“So I’m withdrawing the Royal Charter, and going away to think of a better idea. Labour and the Liberal Democrats can keep behaving like the Tea Party in Washington by hijacking bills and trying to force Leveson through. Who knows, they may succeed. But I can see an assault on fundamental liberties coming and an administrative disaster too, and I want nothing to do with it.”

Cameron, of course, will say nothing of the sort. He is as weak in his own way as Miliband. But all of the above remains true, particularly the point about fear spreading through what is meant to be a free country. It is outrageous that Brian Leveson and Parliament are telling magazines, local newspapers, websites and national newspapers, who have behaved honourably, that they must pay to join a regulator, which can punish them for writing within the law, or face punitive damages in the courts if they refuse.

Punitive or exemplary damages are essentially criminal penalties in civil cases. A judge can punish a regulator even if he wins a case, by ordering him to pay costs. If he loses then the sky’s the limit. Judges do not like them for obvious reasons, and the Court of Appeal has severely restricted their use. In the days when Labour was in government and stuck by sensible principles, the Department for Constitutional Affairs consultation paper, The Law on Damages (CP 9/07) refused to extend their use in civil cases.

The Government … considers that there should be no further lessening through statute of the restrictions on the availability of exemplary damages. The purpose of the civil law on damages is to provide compensation for loss, and not to punish. The function of exemplary damages is more appropriate to the criminal law, and their availability in civil proceedings blurs the distinctions between the civil and criminal law.

If you are a writer or publisher – who has never hacked a phone or monstered an innocent person – and are frightened by the attempt by Leveson and the current parliament to extend exemplary damages, take some heart from this briefing from Gill Phillips, the chief legal officer at the Guardian and Observer.

It is worth noting that Lord Justice Leveson neither invited nor received submissions on exemplary damages during his Inquiry and the recommendations in the Report on exemplary damages are based on an out of date Law Commission report which was prepared before the Human Rights Act 1998 was passed.

In other words, he didn’t know what he was talking about and did not take steps to remedy his ignorance. Phillips continues

What is regarded as particular objectionable is the fact that thesesingle out for punishment a particular category of defendant, rather than a particular kind of conduct, all the more so where the category of defendant singled out includes the press. The advice here is particularly strong, namely: to punish the press for what others may do without punishment is inconsistent with the special importance that both domestic and Strasbourg jurisprudence attaches to freedom of the press under Art 10 of the ECHR.

Leaving aside the very serious concerns in principle about introducing exemplary damages, anyone reading what is proposed in the latest draft clauses and comparing them with what the Leveson Report recommended can’t but say that these current clauses are a million miles away from what the Report recommended.

In other words, the courts will strike this down. This is why no big publisher apart from the editor of the Independent is signing up to the new regulator. They know that Hugh Grant, Miliband and Clegg have got greedy and stupid. They had the old Fleet Street on its knees. It was willing to offer concessions, many of which I would have welcomed because I believe that the old Fleet Street needs a tough independent regulator as long as there is no hint of political control.. But like many another greedy and stupid man before them, they have overreached, and may end up with nothing. The first publisher to be hit with exemplary damages will be able to take a human rights case to Strasbourg if necessary. I know from private conversations that lawyers are queuing up to fight what would be one of the great free speech cases in British legal history, and that they are confident that they can win

I implore writers and small publishers to follow suit and not to be frightened by the clowns in Westminster either, and to carry investigating and arguing and debating. True censors in Britain’s past and in today’s dictatorships are frightening. Their modern British equivalents, Hacked Off and Labour and the Lib Dems – the celebs and the pols – are many things. They are contemptuous of human rights and the procedures of parliament. They are as willing to threaten serious journalism as malicious journalism. They are ignorant of this country’s liberal traditions, and they are caught up in a cultish frenzy. But they are not truly frightening. They can be beaten.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/leveson-dont-let-the-state-frighten-you/feed/0Hitch fighthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/hitch-fight/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/hitch-fight/#commentsThu, 14 Mar 2013 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=8864541Before the crash of 2007, as aid agencies were asking the governments of what we once called ‘the rich world’…

]]>Before the crash of 2007, as aid agencies were asking the governments of what we once called ‘the rich world’ to wipe out poor countries’ debts, Christopher Hitchens received a begging letter from his publishers.

Verso, if you have never come across it, boasts that it is ‘the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world’. Its old stagers are Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson, Marxist-Leninists of the upper class, who had been Hitchens’s comrades on the soixante-huitard left. Hitchens told me that along with aristocratic style of their fine offices in London and New York went the classic capitalist desire to expropriate the fruits of the workers’ labour.

As ‘debt forgiveness’ was in the air, Verso had said to him, would he forgive the debts of his publishers by allowing them to keep his royalties? ‘They think,’ said Hitchens, his eyes shining with incredulous glee, ‘that I’m the equivalent of the World Bank and that they’re the equivalent of a banana republic.’

Verso looks like a tin-pot dictatorship now. The publishing house has done something I have not seen since the passing of communism: denounced its dead author for his ideological deviations. It recruited one Richard Seymour, a Marxist Leninist hack, to produce Unhitched. (Geddit?) Among his many, many other sins, Seymour accuses his Verso colleague of being a ‘terrible liar’, ‘career-minded’, a ‘power fetishist’, ‘a cliché’ an ‘ouvrierist’ and, worst of all, an apostate who abandoned ‘the left’ to support the West’s wars against al-Qa’eda and Saddam Hussein.

As that ‘ouvrierist’ suggests, nature did not intend Mr Seymour to write. Whatever you think of Hitchens’s arguments, he loved the English language, and it loved him back. Seymour read the collected works of that compelling stylist and still produced sentences such as, ‘Turns to the right among the intelligentsia were drawn out processes punctuated by miniwaves and with distinct temporalities.’

People write this badly when they have something to hide. Seymour and Verso’s secret is that when they say ‘the left’ they mean the far left, which in our age is also an ally of the far right: the 21st-century equivalent of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Verso publishes the speeches of Osama bin Laden. Without irony or self-awareness, Seymour denounces Hitchens’s support for Salman Rushdie and opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini. This is a world where any enemy of the West, even a clerical and reactionary enemy that executes leftists, must be supported; where Seymour can say ‘the ascendant form of resistant politics had become one or other variant of Islamism’ and mean ‘resistant’ as a compliment.

The trouble is that the heretic-hunter fears that the reader may see through his double standards. It is therefore not enough for him to criticise his target’s ideas, he seems to want to destroy his target’s character too. But how? He can say he was a bad man in private. Intelligent readers will just separate the writer from the work, the gossip from the gist, and shrug.

The practised calumniator knows there is only one killer charge to level in these circumstances: plagiarism. Everything about the writer becomes fraudulent then, because ‘the work’ becomes stolen goods.

Deplorably, Seymour levels it at Hitchens. Seymour writes that ‘a great deal of his work on Bill Clinton’s betrayal on health care’ in No One Left to Lie To, Hitchens’s polemic on the Clinton administration, was ‘lifted’ from another journalist. Shocking behaviour, I am sure you agree. But Seymour does not say that the section on health filled a modest part of the book. And in the endnotes he concedes, ‘In fairness, Hitchens credited [the journalist’s] work in the chapter in the paperback edition.’ In other words, Seymour is a critic who makes an allegation in the daylight of the main text and withdraws it in the gloom of the small print.

His most sensational charge is that Hitchens’s The Missionary Position, a celebrated assault on Mother Teresa, was straight theft. Verso said when it published in the 1990s that Hitchens had based it on a documentary, Hell’s Angel, that he had presented on Channel 4. Hitchens certainly made the programme, you can still see it on YouTube. But Seymour says an Indian author ‘produced most of the original research’ for the book. Verso thought the manuscript needed rewriting. Its editors passed it to Hitchens, who then won fame and notoriety by passing it off as his own work.

‘Who was the Indian author?’ I asked a Verso press spokeswoman. She did not know. ‘Why didn’t Verso insist on crediting him or her on the dust jacket?’ Ah, came the reply, the mysterious Indian ‘didn’t mind’ Hitchens’s theft. He must be the most easy-going writer in human history, I thought, but went along with the spin and asked, ‘Well why didn’t Seymour say that?’

The spokeswoman did not know; but the true answer is that ‘the left’ detests Hitchens’s ‘betrayal’ and cannot grant him the smallest concession. One of Hitchens’s stock of quotes was a warning against allowing hatred to so grip your mind that you no longer cared what you said. ‘The man who thinks any stick will do will pick up a boomerang.’ I think it is from Chesterton, but cannot find the source, but I am certain that if Richard Seymour and Tariq Ali look up they will see a boomerang whirling through the air to smack them in the face.

While I had the Verso PR woman on the line, I remembered that it had published my own book Cruel Britannia in 2000.

‘I can’t remember the last time I saw a royalty statement,’ I said.

‘Ah well, we have been upgrading our royalty department for a couple of years,’ she replied.

Years, I thought. It takes years for a small publisher to ‘upgrade’?

‘I want any money I am owed now,’ I said, and hung up.

Young lefties beware. If you can write, or even, as in the case of Seymour, you cannot, Verso will offer to publish you. Stay away. The record shows that it will try to take your money if you toe the party line, and trash your reputation if you do not.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/hitch-fight/feed/84HitchensfeaturedWar on whistleblowershttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/02/war-on-whistleblowers/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/02/war-on-whistleblowers/#commentsThu, 07 Feb 2013 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=8839521My guard goes up when people in power say that they believe in investigative journalism. Everybody says they do, of…

]]>My guard goes up when people in power say that they believe in investigative journalism. Everybody says they do, of course. Then everyone says they have a sense of humour, most especially when they don’t. Just as I doubt the merriment of someone who needs to announce, ‘I enjoy a joke as much as the next man,’ so I worry about politicians and bureaucrats who make perfunctory commitments to serious journalism.

Look around and you will see that their deeds belie their words. Almost without anyone noticing, a great silence is falling over the British state. Civil servants, police and prison officers are shutting up as they realise the dangers of talking to journalists are too perilous to risk.

A good thing too, you may mutter, if silence will stop allegations that police officers stitched up the chief whip or sold a celebrity’s minor transgressions to the peeping toms of the tabloids. But think before you cheer on repression. An old and worthwhile protection for liberal societies is vanishing in the aftermath of the hacking scandal, without the traditional guardians of liberalism giving a damn.

The requirement to protect your sources was the one moral principle journalists had. Self-interest played its part — confidential sources will not speak to reporters if they suspect they will reveal their identities to the police or their employers. But a reporter’s honour mattered as much. You had made a deal with a source. You had given your promise and shaken hands. Your source could lose his or her job or liberty if you broke your word. You had to keep it.

A few years ago, Bob Woodward published The Secret Man, an affecting memoir of his dealings with his confidential source during the Watergate affair, which brought down the Nixon administration. Everyone wanted to know who his ‘Deep Throat’ was. Woodward would not say. By 2002, however, the world had moved on. His source, Mark Felt, an associate director of the FBI at the time of Watergate, was 88 and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Woodward asked his old editor Ben Bradlee if, finally, he could now tell the full story. ‘You’ve got one problem, pal,’ said Bradlee. ‘Do you owe allegiance to a man who is no longer that man who you gave your word to? The answer is yes — an unequivocal yes.’

Felt was in no condition to give informed consent to publication. Woodward had to remain true to the deal he had struck in the early 1970s. And so he did until a rival broke the story.

This is the way journalists used to behave. But look at how they are behaving now. Before the trial of Vicky Pryce and Chris Huhne began, the Director of Public Prosecutions said that he had been trying to get evidence from the Sunday Times to use against them. John Witherow, its editor, and Isabel Oakeshott, its political editor, said they would fight his attempt to compromise a source. But, the DPP continued, at the last minute the Sunday Times ‘consented to producing the material in question just before the appeal was due to be heard’.

If you think that their colleagues will now treat Witherow and Oakeshott as pariahs, you do not understand what is going on in journalism. They are mere amateurs when set alongside their employer. To save his leathery hide, Rupert Murdoch responded to the hacking scandal by ordering a team of managers to go through every confidential email and expenses claim in News International and hand compromising evidence to the police.

By my last count, detectives had arrested 100 reporters and sources. Not all of them are suppliers of celebrity tittle-tattle, incidentally. The Met is rounding up journalists who covered serious stories along with the gossip-mongers. ‘Murdoch betrays everyone in the end,’ one of the arrested hacks told me. ‘Politicians, his first wife, his children, his reporters and now their contacts.’

Only the great hatred of the tabloids among educated people is preventing the British grasping the enormity of what Murdoch and the Metropolitan Police are doing. One of the largest news organisations in Europe is collaborating with the state with a vigour and thoroughness unmatched in the history of democratic nations.

Naturally, the authorities are delighted. Judges, police officers and civil servants want to know who has leaked so they can punish the guilty and deter potential imitators. I am sure the Nixon administration would have been equally delighted if it could have forced Bob Woodward to reveal Mark Felt’s identity. Until recently, the only defence against the state’s demands was the press’s insistence that protection of sources was in the wider public interest. That defence is now crumbling.

Lord Justice Leveson announced his findings with the usual flannel about a free press being a bulwark of democracy. But as soon as he came to his recommendations he offered a design for a society in which the bureaucracy cannot be challenged.

Leveson recommended stripping legal protections from journalists. He wanted Parliament to repeal the section in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which, in effect, told the police that they can only go after journalists’ sources as a last resort. As for the leaking of information in the public interest, there was no need for it, Leveson opined. As an alternative to whistleblowing, he proposed a hotline for perturbed police officers. ‘A designated one of the Inspectors within HM Inspectorate Constabulary [should be] the first port of call for “whistleblowing” in relation to the conduct of senior officers within the police service,’ he wrote.

In plain English, he was saying, ‘There’s no need to make a fuss, or wash dirty linen in public, old chap. All your worries can be handled internally by following the correct procedures.’ Labour, the Liberal Democrats and many Tories agree with him.

I am not asking you to like the press. I don’t like it, and I work for it. But I am insisting that you start to worry about the way Britain is going. All over the country, people with information you may need to know are looking at the punishments for speaking out and shutting up. You may loathe the excesses of the tabloids, but I warn you that your loathing is paving the way for the excesses of the unaccountable state.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/02/war-on-whistleblowers/feed/13ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MENfeaturedExport-only justicehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/12/export-only-justice/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/12/export-only-justice/#commentsThu, 06 Dec 2012 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=8781321In the last few years lawyers have begun to gush about the ‘Sumption effect’. They were not thinking of Jonathan…

]]>In the last few years lawyers have begun to gush about the ‘Sumption effect’. They were not thinking of Jonathan Sumption QC’s fine legal mind — which was of such a quality that the Supreme Court elevated him straight from the Bar to a seat on the highest court in the land. Nor were they praising his history of the Hundred Years’ War, a conflict of such violence and duplicity that perhaps only an English lawyer could do justice to it. Rather, his peers gazed on his wealth in wonder, and hoped that his riches would flow into their pockets too.

Sumption had collected about £7 million for representing Roman Abramovich in his fight with Boris Berezovsky. The case told commentators much about how hard-faced men moved to divide the spoils after the fall of the Soviet empire. But they barely discussed its most extraordinary aspect. The oligarchs’ dispute was none of our business. It had nothing to do with England. Yet an English judge spent a year considering it, English lawyers made fortunes from its arguments, and English politicians began to salivate at the sight of so much taxable income.

After the abrasive and necessary critiques of the bankers, MPs and journalists, it is high time that we turned our attention to lawyers. Not only are they increasingly calling the shots in public life, but they are presiding over a system in which money determines access to justice.

Berezovsky v. Abramovich was hardly an isolated case. London is becoming a global legal centre: the hub of a roaring international market that is drawing in plutocrats and corporations from every continent. Sumption has had his ‘effect’. In February, the Lawyer (a trade magazine for the profession) reported that QCs were demanding a ‘Russian premium’ of between £800 and £1,000 an hour for bog-standard barristers and £1,500 an hour for the Bar’s stars (with brief fees on top, of course).

You might say that English law has had worldwide reach since the empire. But London’s new globalised law does not confine itself to litigants from the old imperial possessions. It welcomes anyone from anywhere who can pay. In all seriousness, politicians now talk of the law of the land as a foreign exchange earner. Kenneth Clarke, then justice secretary, told City lawyers at Clifford Chance last year, ‘The UK may no longer be able to boast that it is the workshop of the world. But the UK can be lawyer to the world.’ Boris Johnson told the Confederation of British Industry last month that 47 per cent of the world’s legal services exports come from the UK. We should rejoice, he cried, and celebrate the trickle-down effects. ‘Those rouble-fuelled refreshers and retainers find their way into the pockets of chefs and waiters and doormen and janitors and nannies and tutors and actors, and put bread on the tables of some of the poorest and hardest-working -families.’

So keen are ministers to attract passing trade, they provide court services for next to nothing. Oligarchs at the High Court or Court of Appeal pay £1,090 for a trial hearing regardless of its length. The Ministry of Justice suggested last year that it might raise the price, but nothing came of the plan. Like Buckingham Palace and the National Theatre, the law is subsidised by the taxpayer because it brings in the tourists.

It is easy to understand why litigants come. Writing in 1940, George Orwell came as close as he ever could to praising the British establishment. ‘The hanging judge,’ he said, ‘that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe is one of the symbolic figures of England.’

So he remains. The average English judge has no instinctive understanding of the importance of freedom of speech, or of rights to protest and rights of association. Since he has had the power to enforce the European Convention on Human Rights, the only right he has enforced with vigour is the right of celebrities to keep their private lives out of the newspapers. Yet for all his double standards and blind spots, the notion that he might take a bribe or obey an unlawful command from a politician is as hard to credit now as in Orwell’s day — for the time being at any rate.

You cannot say the same of judges in Moscow, New Delhi or Beijing, and businesses all over the world know it. One of the most revealing cases of recent years was an action brought by the Russian bank VTB Capital. An English High Court judge said VTB had to pursue its case in Russia. The bank went to the Court of Appeal. It too said VTB had to go to Russia. The distraught bankers appealed again to the Supreme Court, a step that would have occasioned less comment had not VTB been a state-owned Russian bank. Even the Russian state does not trust the Russian courts, and prefers to resolve its disputes here.

One can sympathise with the Russians’ desire to avoid the Putin kleptocracy, but that does not mean that England should welcome allcomers in the pursuit of wealth at any cost.

The Department of Justice’s failure to make oligarchs meet the cost of their cases is suggestive of a wider failure to understand that the law is a business that depends on public support. While they are luring oligarchs to Britain, ministers are cutting judges’ pensions. In a wicked world full of suffering, the hardships of High Court judges on salaries of £173,000 are unlikely to send hot, salty tears streaming down your cheeks. You only have to look at the sums paid to the oligarchs’ lawyers, however, to realise how small the judges’ remuneration packages seem in the well-appointed world of legal London. In the past, a barrister gave up the chance of stupendous fees in return for the generous pension a seat on the bench brought. The state has now broken the old bargain. Judges are talking of returning to private practice, and warning that the next generation of Jonathan Sumptions may not be as ready to abandon private practice for public service. The British state’s determination to chase foreign earnings while lowering public spending threatens the judicial standards that bring in international ‘business’ in the first place.

But, then, the legal trade’s talk of law as a ‘business’ ought to set your teeth on edge. The law is the first public service of a nation. Without it, the public realm and private contracts cannot be policed. Now that the legal profession is seeking to internationalise English law, we risk watching the birth of a special interest that is no longer tied to the nation state. How long will it be before lawyers warn that legal reform threatens a vital export industry?

I heard a hint of what may be coming during the campaign to liberalise the libel laws. It took me a while to realise that this was the first movement for law reform I know of that worked without significant support from lawyers. Individual solicitors did stout service, but the Law Society and Bar Council stayed silent, while Lord Hoffmann and other members of the legal establishment did everything they could to fight us. One of the primary aims of the free-speech movement was to stop Russian oligarchs, Saudi petro-billionaires and Icelandic bankers coming to London and using England’s libel laws to punish critics from all over the world. Libel tourism does not raise much revenue, but the chance for a plutocrat to sponge his reputation clean in the High Court was a part of the package London law firms could supply to the super-rich. If it went, their ‘offer’ would be less enticing.

If you want an example of how dangerous the globalisation of national institutions can be, you need only look at the City. Even after the great crash of 2007/8, and the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, the City still argues that reform will threaten its position in the global finance industry. Ministers have listened, and allowed financiers to stop the separation of retail and casino banking.

There is certainly nervousness in legal circles about criticisms of the oligarchs. Mishcon de Reya — once lawyers to Princess Diana, no less — commissioned the original version of this article. Its solicitors had read a column I had written in the Observer on the subject and wanted a ‘challenging piece’ for a magazine they send their clients. When they read it, they found it too challenging by half. They were terrified that a foreign client might take offence. So terrified, in fact, that they killed it.

Here is the paradox of today’s law. Lawyers are everywhere. If a government is embarrassed it calls in a judge to investigate. When a special interest group wants to thwart a government decision, it calls in a judge to review it. Legalistic codes and lawyerly procedures regulate the public and private sectors. It is no exaggeration to say that the law is now stopping us thinking about moral questions. We no longer ask if prisoners should have the right to vote, or citizens should be able to speak as they please. We ask what the law thinks. ‘Is it legal?’ is replacing ‘Is it right?’

Yet at the same time as legal standards flourish, the legal profession of England and Wales is distancing itself from the English and the Welsh. Its best lawyers no longer want to work for them, because they cannot afford the fees. Its judges cannot hear their disputes for months because they are tied up hearing the disputes of oligarchs. Government cuts to legal aid mean that ministers are pushing the poorest in England and Wales outside the rule of law. Those needy and hard-working families whom Boris Johnson wants to cheer on the lawyers cannot receive justice themselves. As for the rest of us, with businesses, investment portfolios and annuities, ministers are already urging us to settle our personal and commercial disputes by arbitration, which is a reasonable way for reasonable people to reach an agreement; but if one of the parties is unreasonable, the middle classes still need good judges and lawyers to intervene.

They are becoming harder to find. When I first looked at the Abramovich case, a senior judge told me that he knew English corporate lawyers who had never represented a human being. Soon we will have English corporate lawyers who have never represented an English company either. If the government and legal profession could stop scouring the planet for fat retainers, they would have the time to ponder a pressing question: whose law is it anyway?

]]>A love for freedom of the press inspired Milton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, Mill and Orwell. Ringing declarations of the right of citizens to read and write what they choose have run through constitutions and charters of liberties. Modern Britain being the way it is, however, the lofty rhetoric of the past has sunk to debates about celebs and breasts. Specifically, the breasts on page three of The Sun, and the tits who publish them.

Evan Harris, tribune of the Hacked Off campaign, makes a plausible argument that an effective press regulator could ban page three girls. After Lord Justice Leveson hears all the evidence of mass wrongdoing by journalists, he is likely to recommend a media authority that would treat journalists as if they were professionals akin to doctors or lawyers. Once that step has been taken, Harris, a former Liberal Democrat MP, could say that no employer allows boorish men to stick up pictures of naked women in the workplace. They demean and intimidate female colleagues. But the Sun still prints pictures ‘it would never put on the walls of its own newsroom’. Why would a reputable regulator overseeing journalists committed to new professional standards allow that?

The battles around Leveson are likely to turn vicious. Fleet Street knows how much it may lose, and knows that it has no one to blame but itself. Not a single hacking story the Leveson inquiry has told us about was in the public interest. Journalists and their managers had the powers of a secret police force to monitor private conversations. All they did was hack the phones of celebrities and the victims of crime. They cannot produce in their defence one example of illegal surveillance being used to expose an abuse of power or corruption of government.

It is not even as if everyone demanding regulation is an authoritarian. The academics around the Hacked Off campaign are in my experience products of late-20th–century leftism. Their only enemy is corporate power, and they can always find reasons to be somewhere else when basic liberties need defending. Nor do I see why the freedoms of this country should be torn up because Hacked Off’s star witness Max Mosley believes that if a gentleman wishes to hire whores by the half-dozen to beat his bottom to a pulp, it is nobody’s business but his own. But Evan Harris could not be more different. He is one of the most impressive and principled politicians I know: and a friend and comrade in the campaign for libel reform. Meanwhile Brian Cathcart, the driving force behind Hacked Off, was a serious journalist before he became an academic, and published a fine investigation into the deaths of soldiers at the Deepcut barracks.

In other words, if you want to take them on, you need to do better than reproduce the self-interested snarls of wounded Fleet Street editors. You make a start when you grasp that journalism has never been and cannot be a profession. Freedom of the press is the freedom of all citizens to write and broadcast. Once that freedom was as risible as the old joke that capitalism meant that everyone was free to book a room at the Ritz. In theory, everyone had the right to enjoy the freedom to publish. In practice, only the employees of public or private media corporations could exercise it. Journalism was not a profession but it was a kind of guild. If the Leveson inquiry had happened 30 years ago, it could have proposed tighter regulation of the journalists’ club. Now laws on the press affect everyone who blogs, tweets and posts. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that we are all journalists now.

Leveson knows it. And the contortions of those who hope for statutory regulation suggest that they know it too. They can no longer define a ‘newspaper’. Is it an established title or is it every news site and blog published in Britain? They try to escape modernity by using advertising and readership ‘thresholds’ to determine which sites should fall under the ambit of the new regulator and which should not. They fail to understand that the most obscure blogs can receive huge audiences if links and search engines direct readers to a sensational post. In desperation, they say that newspapers can do more harm than isolated bloggers or Tweeters. This is not true either. Malicious posts on local sites concern the clients of libel lawyers as much as the writing in the national press.

As with legitimate constraints on free speech, so with illegitimate suppression. Case after case now shows that the battle against censorship has moved online. The Crown Prosecution Service’s persecution of Paul Chambers for joking about blowing up an airport and the Trafford Housing Trust’s decision to punish a Christian employee for voicing his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook are the new free-speech battles for the 21st century.

I do not wish to pre-empt his lordship, but Leveson seems to want to have an exclusive form of control for kite-marked approved newspapers which are covered by his new regulator. Newspapers that refuse to join — and Private Eye –may be one — and everyone else who writes on the web will continue to suffer the punitive costs of our archaic libel laws.

This strikes me as not only contrary to natural justice but as an anachronism in itself. The arrival of the web demands wholesale legal reform. We need cheap means to resolve disputes — and if that means cutting costs by substituting the continental system of inquisitorial magistrates for our ferociously expensive adversarial system in free speech cases, so be it. We need independent judges to hear cases rather than regulators who are susceptible to political pressure. Above all, we need consistency. If Hacked Off wants to ban page three, it should be forced to make the argument for banning all images of naked women everywhere.

In their hearts everyone around Leveson knows this. The peeping toms who bugged celebrities are not in trouble because they broke professional codes and moral guidelines — though they did. They are in trouble because they broke the law of the land, which applies to everyone.

At a time when all can publish, we need one law for all. Anything else will seem as out of date as hot metal presses.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/11/whose-freedom-whose-press/feed/11CoverfeaturedNowhere to hidehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/09/nowhere-to-hide-2/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/09/nowhere-to-hide-2/#commentsThu, 13 Sep 2012 13:12:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=7986731Ever since the millennium, I have wondered how long the utopian faith in the emancipatory potential of the web will…

]]>Ever since the millennium, I have wondered how long the utopian faith in the emancipatory potential of the web will last. Of course, we know the new technologies give the citizen new powers to communicate and connect. We hear this praised so loudly and so often, how could we not know? But what benefits the individual also benefits the powerful, and gives states and corporations surveillance powers the secret police forces of the 20th century could only dream of.

If you doubt me, consider how today’s scandals are technologically enabled. The Telegraph’s publication of MPs’ expenses would have been impossible 30 years ago. The source would have had to photocopy hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper. Even if he could do it without his colleagues noticing, he would need a truck to move them past security guards. Now he can just put them on a memory stick and walk out of the office. The Leveson inquiry released embarrassingly intimate text messages between Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron that both must have assumed were for their eyes only. Meanwhile, the Murdoch newspapers that Brooks once ran have handed the police emails and expense claims that detectives can use in evidence against stunned reporters who never imagined that electronic records of their past could return to destroy their careers.

Moore’s Law holds that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. One day Moore’s Law will run into the laws of physics, and the expansion will stall. Until it does, the costs of storing and retrieving data will remain trivial and what I will call Nelson’s Law will apply. Fraser Nelson, editor of this journal, noticed recently that when politicians want to say something private, they invariably write notes or whisper rather than email or text. ‘The delete button lies,’ the editor concluded. You can throw your mobile in a river, delete your emails or wipe your browsing history but a record of your activity survives. Readers may delight in fiddled expense claims humiliating MPs and forgotten emails allowing the cops to feel the collars of journalists. You are only flesh and blood, after all. But what if the same thing were to happen to you?

In the United States, there is bipartisan political pressure to protect the citizen from the surveillance boom. John Kerry and John McCain have co-sponsored a bill that requires all who collect information on the web to alert their customers and allow them to opt out if they don’t want their privacy infringed. Beyond isolated politicians, campaign groups and academics, there is no comparable level of concern about online privacy in Britain, which is a pity because we need concern now more than ever.

The Communications Data Bill currently before Parliament is extraordinary in several respects. It is extraordinary because the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats successfully opposed introducing a similar measure when Labour was in power. On arrival in office, they stood on their heads and advocated the very surveillance powers they once denounced. It is extraordinary because the coalition can perform its U-turn without significant public protest. But the most extraordinary aspect is the sweeping nature of the bill’s provisions. It would ‘ensure that communications data is available to be obtained from telecommunications operators’. Ever since the coalition published it, appalled telecommunications operators have been trying to work out what that means.

Labour invited the representatives of web companies into Downing Street before it attempted to monitor the internet, a leading industry figure told me in private. Not so the coalition. Instead, witnesses to a parliamentary committee scrutinising the bill are trying to map the future of the surveillance state. No one believes the Home Office story that the bill is merely a tidying up exercise that will allow the security services to respond to technological change. The Home Office wants every type of electronic communication stored and available for inspection. The bill is not a tweak to the existing law but a radical expansion of state power. As Malcolm Hutty, from the London Internet Exchange, told Parliament, the bill is ‘not merely changing the volume of data that is collected but also the nature and character of that data’.

The government attempts to reassure its critics by saying it just wants access to records of everyone’s data — lists of searches and of who emailed whom — not the content. But the distinction between the two has collapsed. In the last decade, campaigners for web privacy argued that if snoopers saw that a woman’s web browsing history included ‘google.com/search?q=pregnancy+test,’ they would learn a great deal about her. Data about the search was as good as content. The same applied to searches for political websites.

But in the 2010s these arguments have an almost antique feel, as online usage explodes. Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, tries to explain the irrelevance of old distinctions by imaging a tech-savvy consumer walking by a shop. The shop has a QR code offering 10 per cent off. ‘You scan the QR code with your mobile. You have gone to that website. As you walk around the street and interact with reality, your traffic data, your communications data, is not just a history of your location, through your cell site location history, it is also a history of your attention.’ Anderson says the Home Office’s technical papers suggest to him that it wants automatic access to every ‘service we use to communicate’. That means not just internet service providers, but Google and Facebook too. ‘If you get up in the morning and check your Facebook account from home and then on the Tube from your phone and then at work from your desktop, it is an awful lot easier to follow you through Facebook systems than it is to follow you through the systems of several different content service providers,’ he warns.

The scale of the government’s ambitions is evident in the amount of money it is prepared to spend on blanket surveillance. The Home Office estimates that the retention of information on everyone will cost at least £1.8 billion over the next decade — the Financial Times believes the true figure will be closer to £2.5 billion. Ryan Gallagher, a London-based technology correspondent, put the British state’s expenditure in a sobering context. Assad’s Syria spent $17.9 million on technology that gave it the ‘power to intercept, scan and catalogue virtually every email that flows through the country’. Gaddafi’s Libya spent $25 million. Iran paid $131 million as part of a contract for a mass monitoring system reportedly to ‘locate users, intercept their voice, text messages … emails, chat conversations or web access.’ Even the famed and feared great firewall of China is meant to have cost less than $1 billion.

You can look at the costs another way and note that British Venture Capital Association members invested £37 million in the internet industry last year. The association does not represent all investors by any means, but that statistic remains a telling one. The coalition is prepared to spend more — vastly more — on snooping on the web than on building technology firms that might help secure our economic future.

In private, tech executives say they are worried about Britain setting a lead which authoritarian states will follow. The Home Office wants to operate without borders. It will engage in the blanket monitoring of traffic to every country in the world. Why shouldn’t other countries follow suit? In public, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, told Parliament that if the bill became law, ‘we would immediately move to a default of encrypting all the connections to the UK so that the local ISP would be able to see only that you are speaking to Wikipedia and not what you are reading.’ His threat ought to cause a pained reappraisal. Britain — not Iran or China or Russia — may force Wikipedia to bring security precautions to protect us from our over-mighty state.

Any intelligent criminal would respond to the new police powers by opening free untraceable email accounts with a foreign company and encrypting his correspondence. What is the government going to do then? Engage in mass hacking?

The state has all kinds of arguments in its defence. The best was put by Sadie Creese, professor of cyber-security at Oxford University. The fears of the government’s critics, she implied, were almost paranoid. She had met many of the spies at GCHQ and found them to be decent people who only wanted to catch and stop criminals. ‘I have been impressed by their level of professionalism and the way in which they go about their job,’ she told Parliament. ‘I have no criticism to make whatsoever. Speaking personally, I trust not just in that organisation but in the United Kingdom and the way in which we go about governing ourselves.’

I am sure that is all true, but Professor Creese failed to ask herself why on the whole we can trust those who work for GCHQ and have confidence in ‘the way in which we go about governing ourselves’. The counter-intuitive answer is that for centuries, the British have treated politicians and bureaucrats who wish to expand the police powers of state with intense suspicion. Since the 18th century, we have compared our governments to the rulers of absolutist France, militarist Prussia, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. The comparisons have invariably been wild and, indeed, paranoid. But suspicion kept the state in line.

As the price of liberty is perpetual hyperbole, let me end with the mandatory Orwell reference. Every reader of Nineteen Eighty-Four remembers the ‘telescreens’ the party installed, which had the potential to watch every movement and record every sound. Early in the novel, Winston Smith half-heartedly attempts the mandatory morning exercises. He assumes that no one is watching him, and allows his mind to wander, when: ‘“Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.”’

Orwell did not understand that televisions would not be able to spy on the citizen. Computers and mobile phones can. They supply evidence it would have taken teams of Stasi officers to collect. New technologies ought to bring new protections. Yet the British government is offering no new safeguards to ensure that its mass collection of data does not infringe on the rights of the citizen. It is not proposing to grant additional powers of parliamentary or judicial oversight; or saying that any public servant who misuses information will face horrendous punishment. It has no answer to those who warn that the more confidential information the state collects, the more likely it is to leak. Its response to its critics is casual, almost contemptuous. In these circumstances, Parliament ought to press the delete button and hope that just for once Nelson’s Law does not apply and the erasure is final.

]]>The guards would not let me walk round the Olympic park. ‘We’re in lockdown because of a security alert,’ one explained. The rain fell. The overbearing policing intimidated. ‘London is going to host the Paralympics and the paramilitary Olympics,’ I muttered with unpatriotic grumpiness, as I retreated to the bright lights and piped music of Stratford’s new Westfield centre, only to find another lockdown in progress.

David Cameron said the Olympics should be a ‘showcase of national enterprise and innovation’. As far as the enterprising shopkeepers and restaurant managers at Westfield were concerned, the games might as well not be happening. There were no adverts inviting people to enjoy Olympic lunches at the cafés or signs in the shop windows wishing Team GB the best. Westfield had little to distinguish it from any other shopping centre from New York to Shanghai. They were coy because Britain is at the start of an experiment in the criminalisation of everyday speech; a locking down of the English language with punishments for those who speak too freely.

In the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act of 2006, the government granted the organisers remarkable concessions. Most glaringly, its Act is bespoke legislation that breaks the principle of equality before the law. Britain has not offered all businesses and organisations more powers to punish rivals who seek to trade on their reputation. It has given privileges to the ­Olympics alone. The government has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls ‘List A’ — ‘Games’; ‘Two Thousand and Twelve’; ‘2012’; ‘twenty twelve’. The judges must also come down hard on a business or charity that takes a word from List A and conjoins it with one or more words from ‘List B’ — ‘Gold’; ‘Silver’; ‘Bronze’; ‘London’; ‘medals’; ‘sponsors’; ‘summer’. Common nouns are now private property.

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games does not stop there. To cover all eventualities, it warns the unwary that they can create an ‘unwarranted association’ without using forbidden words. They threaten anyone who infringes the exclusive deals of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Adidas, Dow, Samsung, Visa and the games’ other multi-million-dollar sponsors in however oblique a manner. And not just with the normal damages in the civil courts. The state has granted the police powers under the criminal law to enter ‘land or premises’ and to ‘remove, destroy, conceal or erase any infringing article’.

The Olympics want to ban the often witty attempts by businesses to annoy the official sponsors with ‘ambush marketing’. My favourite was at the 1992 Winter Olympics when American Express ran an ad saying, ‘You don’t need a visa to visit the Games’ — which Visa had, of course, sponsored. Visa could do nothing about American Express’s cheek then. Now the authorities will meet similar attempts to spoil the sponsors’ party with punishments in the criminal courts.

To concentrate on the interests of sponsors, however, is to miss the fanaticism of the authoritarian mentality behind the games. Priests sacrificed oxen and rams to Zeus and Pelops at the ancient Olympics. Their successors sacrifice the freedom to speak and publish to the gods of corporate capitalism and international sport. They regard encroachments on their holy space, however trifling, as a modern version of sacrilege.

Trading standards officers in Stoke on Trent told a florist to take down floral Olympic rings. Offending sausage rings vanished from a butcher’s window in Dorset. It is not only rings. The Olympic organising committee warned estate agents in the West Country that they must remove Olympic torches made from old ‘for sale’ signs or face ‘formal legal action’. When the British Sugarcraft Guild asked the authorities if it might run a 2012 cake-decorating competition, it thought it was making a modest request. The Guild was not even going to sell the cakes afterwards. No matter. Only official sponsors could decorate cakes with Olympic symbols, the Olympic organisers ruled. Such petty-minded strictures are not mere protection of a brand, but an obsession with control that is hard to match. Not even the Cuban Communist party claims the right to regulate images of Che Guevara.

The constraints will grow tighter. You will be able to pay with Visa cards at Olympic events but not MasterCards. You will be able to drink Coke but not Pepsi. Whether stewards will turn you away if you arrive in branded clothing is an unanswered question. Certainly, officials will punish an athlete who, deliberately or not, exposes the logo of an unauthorised company. Modern athletes can afford a fine. But what of the Olympic bureaucrats’ warning to spectators that they must not ‘broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet’? In the age of instant uploads from iPhones to Facebook this is an absurd restriction, which will make the organisers the object of derision and contempt if they try to punish offenders.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing is angry that its members have paid taxes towards the £9 billion cost of the games but are not allowed to use the Olympics to seek custom as they could use Wimbledon or the Jubilee. It goes on to raise a more profound point. The Olympic organisers dismiss everyone seeking to exploit the games, from high street butchers to rival multinationals, as ‘parasites’ — an insult I would not throw around if I had allowed the fat and sugar merchants of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola to purchase an association with sport. In reply, the institute says there must be limits to what money can buy. Sponsors should be free to buy good publicity from an event, and protect their investment, but not occupy every possible avenue of advantage. Despite its protests, an occupation of public space is what the sponsors of the 2012 games have bought — with the encouragement of the British government.

Therein lies the true scandal of the 2012 Olympics. Ministers have not told the organisers that Britain is a free county, and they cannot turn officers of the law into McDonald’s, Coke and Visa’s private police force. For a few weeks in August, Britain will be a corporatist dystopia, in which agents of a sporting behemoth will ban the normal and, until now, legal marketing of products, and seek to stop file sharing on social network sites. Britain’s lawyers have shown no desire to tell the Olympic committee that they can’t do that here. Article 10 of the Human Rights Act protects free speech. But in case after case the judiciary has ignored it. The games will provide a further depressing illustration of the weakness of the protections against censorious power. Only this time the whole world will be watching.

In 2005, Britain said it had ‘won’ the Olympics. When the games begin, it will become clear that the Olympics ‘won’ Britain.

]]>The internet can promote freedom and democracy – it’s a shame it also facilitates mob rule and witch-hunts

Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the web provides us with too much information, not too little. Enthusiasts see a future of unlimited free speech when all the old arguments about libel, official secrecy and blasphemy become redundant.

To see how far the consensus spreads look at Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, a new collection of the views of 150 of the world’s leading minds on the technological revolution. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks for the sceptical. He turns off his computer when he needs to think. Like Nicholas Carr — whose essay ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’ infuriated Silicon Valley — he finds that the restless interruptions of working online have added to the ‘world’s attention deficit disorder’. The net’s dismal achievement has been to reduce further our collective attention span ‘from the depths to which television brought it’.

All bracingly iconoclastic. But when Tegmark turns to freedom of speech, he is as sure as the most wide-eyed cyber-utopian that it will flourish online. ‘Once the cat is out of the bag and in the cloud, that’s it,’ he says. ‘Today it’s hard even for Iran and China to prevent information dissemination… The only currently reliable censorship is not to allow the internet at all, like in North Korea’.

His Korean example unintentionally shows how confused not only cosmologists but the rest of us can become when we think about censorship. Nazism, communism and George Orwell’s depiction of Airstrip One in Nineteen Eighty-Four have such a hold on our minds that we forget that for most of the time censorious pressures have not come from classic totalitarian states. When John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty in 1859 he could not have imagined the horrors of the 20th century — I am sure his liberal optimism would have collapsed if he could have done. He was not concerned either with the tiny Victorian British state. Instead, Mill argued against the social pressure to conform to conventional religious and political opinion. ‘Society can and does execute its own mandates,’ he said. ‘It practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.’

Twenty years ago, you would have turned to the mainstream media to see ‘social tyrants’ policing taboos and singling out scapegoats for punishment. Today that role has passed to the web, and, disturbingly, the web is far better at enforcing conformity than the press of the 20th century. In Britain’s case, the day when the new mob succeeded the old was 16 October 2009. Jan Moir, a columnist on the Daily Mail had implied on the basis of no evidence that Stephen Gateley, a singer with Boyzone, had not died a natural death, as the doctors had said, but was the victim of his ‘sleazy’ gay sex games.

I am not defending her. I no more read her work than I vote for Diane Abbott, watch Jeremy Clarkson or support any of the other targets of web-generated outrage. All I am defending are the notions that freedom of speech includes the freedom to be foolish and foul and that criticism should not turn into intimidation. The reaction against Moir was a vicious Twitter-organised mass denunciation. Of all the social media sites, Twitter is best suited to witch-hunting. It eggs its users on with a rolling update of ‘trending topics’ — a list of bandwagons for the multitude to jump on.

The bandwagon that mowed down Moir was more of a juggernaut. So many people complained to the Press Complaints Commission that its website crashed. Advertisers pulled their business from the Mail. Users put Moir’s home address on Twitter so that furious readers could — who knows? — go round to her house and beat her up. My colleague Charlie Brooker of the Guardian, who had written a justifiably scornful article about Moir, had second thoughts when he saw her address flash up on her screen. ‘I felt like part of a mob,’ he said.

Intimidation does not stop at journalists and politicians, who should be able to look after themselves. The old media could only target a few people at a time. The new media allow cyber-stalkers to pick on the ugly girl at school, the trade union member who does not go along with the party line, or, to quote a case I know about, the supporter of Tony Blair who still defends the second Iraq war and has been hounded online and offline by a creep from the Labour left. ‘Your nightmare is just starting,’ he tweeted. ‘It will only get worse for you every day 24/7 till you leave Twitter… Zionists can’t save you… Racist Tory anti-Islamic scum.’ Harassment that began with online abuse ended with him arriving at her university to confront her. She has had to call in the police.

•••

If this rabble-rousing sounds a long way from the concerns of cosmologists and physicists, they should remember that Wikipedia has become the dominant supplier of information to students. Because it crowd­-sources, it invariably reproduces the consensus on any given subject, and forgets that in scientific disputes, as elsewhere, a minority of one can be right; that what is today’s received wisdom will be the future’s folly. When Wikipedia shut down its websites as a protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation this week, the sum of human knowledge may well have increased.

Even in the area of classic political censorship, the net is a Janus-faced technology. I have had the honour of getting to know dissidents from Syria, Iran and Belarus over the past year. Not one of them would abolish the net if they could. They know from hard-won experience that all the claims of the boosters about it permitting the subversion of authoritarian hierarchies by allowing anyone to write at virtually no cost are true. Of course they are. The only way for a regime to stop all dissent now is to become like North Korea.

But the computing technologies remain double-edged, and not only because they allow dictatorships, democratic governments, spies and criminals new tools to collect information on a scale beyond the dreams of the secret police forces of the 20th century. The net gives writers the illusion of unrestricted freedom and then mockingly denies them the power that makes freedom effective.

Researching a book on censorship, I had to hammer into my head this essential distinction between total control and effective control. North Korea has the former. Most dictators manage with the latter. Putin and his mafia friends, for instance, do not worry overmuch that their opponents can publish somewhere in cyberspace or in a few highbrow journals as long as their critics cannot break away from the fringe and reach the mainstream. The regime’s success in containing today’s protests will depend on their ability to ghettoise the opposition media. If it can, then I am afraid it will survive. Similarly, the Islamist persecutors of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie wanted to silence their dissenting voices permanently. When they failed, they too were prepared to settle for the effective control that comes from warning Muslims and ex-Muslims of the awful price they might pay if they speak out against religious orthodoxy. The oligarchs whom England’s wretched legal profession welcome to the High Court in London are no different. They would if they could wipe every unf
lattering word about them from the web. A few have tried, but for the rest the readiness of the English judiciary to punish their critics and announce without shame that they are men of good reputation is compensation enough.

The Web cannot free individuals from the obligation to confront oppressive laws and regimes, and to suffer the same old punishments if they fail. For all the appeal of a cloud floating above us beyond the old controls, the need to struggle for democratic reforms and liberal protections at home and abroad is as great as ever. The net can never set you free. Only politics can do that.
Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is published this week by 4th Estate.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/01/web-of-tyrants/feed/4Diaryhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/07/diary-487/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/07/diary-487/#commentsSat, 09 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=7075743I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to…

]]>I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to disagree — but that he had attacked a book I had not written. He pretended that I believed the West had been right to support Saddam Hussein while he was gassing the Kurds when I had said the opposite. He made up stories about my parents, good people he had never met, to show me in a bad light. Every second paragraph contained a howler. Well, I thought, get a book wrong and the text will confound you. I typed out the passages that proved that he was at best an incompetent reviewer and filed my reply. ‘Get out of that,’ I muttered as I hit the send button.

Ithought no more about it until I looked at my entry on Wikipedia. As well as learning that I was a probable alcoholic, a hypocrite and a supporter of Sarah Palin, I noticed that all reviews of my work were missing except Hari’s effort. Far from saying that he had made wild allegations and I had responded by quoting from the book, a writer working under the pseudonym ‘David r from Meth Productions’ suggested that I had made wild allegations while Hari ‘had offered quotes from Cohen which he argued backed up his claims’. The fearsome honour code by which hacks abide insists that no journalist can sue for libel — if you give it, you must take it. I bowed to its stern injunctions while wishing that my colleagues would grant me a release just this once so that I might relieve Jimmy Wales of a part of his fortune.

I put Hari to the back of my mind again until Cristina Odone told me a strange story. She was deputy editor of the New Statesman during Hari’s time there and had the sense to doubt the reliability of his journalism. After she crossed him, vile accusations appeared on her Wikipedia page. She was a ‘homophobe’ and an ‘anti-Semite’, the site alleged, and such a disastrous journalist that the Catholic Herald had fired her. Her husband, Edward Lucas, went online to defend her reputation, but ‘David r from Meth Productions’ tried to stop him. Mr ‘r’ gave the same treatment to Francis Wheen, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson after they had spats with Hari. It didn’t stop there. Lucas noticed that anonymous editors had inserted Hari’s views on a wide range of people and issues into the relevant Wikipedia pages, while Hari himself had a glowing Wikipedia profile — until the scandal broke, that is — much of it written by ‘David r’. Because Wikipedia lets contributors write anonymously, it cannot tell its readers if ‘David r’ is Johann Hari, or a fan of Hari’s with detailed knowledge of his life, or someone with an interest in promoting his career. But just as the effect of Hari’s phoney interviews was to make it seem that he elicited quotes no other journalist could match, so the effect of Wikipedia is to make him seem one of the essential writers of our times. In truth he disgraced himself because he was an ambitious man who might have been a good journalist, but yearned to be a great one, and so tried to summon a talent he could never possess by bragging and scheming.

In her new memoir The House in France Gully Wells describes the young Martin Amis as the most competitive man she had met. As she was his girlfriend in the 1970s, she should have known, but Amis is not remotely competitive now. When I interviewed him, he said he always refused to comment on other writers. Secure in his talent, he felt no need to do down his rivals. If Amis is self-effacing, Ian McEwan is modest to the point of shyness. He came to my last book launch and was so unobtrusive it took the throng half an hour to realise that one of England’s great writers was in the room. Hilary Mantel remains my favourite literary stoic, however. Despite her producing A Place of Greater Safety and other magnificent novels, prize juries overlooked her. After she finally won the Booker in 2009, she had every right to be triumphalist. Instead, she wrote in the Economist of how ‘once, when I was trudging home from my second failure to win the £20,000 Sunday Express award, a small boy I knew bobbed out on to the balcony of his flat. “Did you win?” I shook my head. “Never mind,” he said, just like everyone else. And then, quite unlike everyone else: “If you like, you can come up and play with my guinea pig.”’ I suspect that Mantel knew for years that she was the real thing, and just needed to wait for the rest of us to catch up.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/07/diary-487/feed/12Liberal England dies againhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/01/liberal-england-dies-again/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/01/liberal-england-dies-again/#commentsSat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=6610603The Lib Dems’ troubles are a result not only of coalition and foolish promises, but of a resurgence of the…

]]>The Lib Dems’ troubles are a result not only of coalition and foolish promises, but of a resurgence of the old left-right division

In 1935, George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England, one of those rare histories that survive long after the author’s death. The elegance and vigour of his description of Edwardian society account for much of his appeal — Dangerfield is as bracing an antidote to the banality of Downton Abbey as you could hope to find. But what stays in readers’ minds is not the style but the brilliance of the argument. Late Victorian liberalism, ‘a various and valuable collection of gold, stocks, Bibles, progressive thoughts and decent inhibitions’, appeared to survive the death of the old queen. The party won a spectacular victory in 1906, and embarked on a worthy programme of free trade and peace abroad and gradual reform at home.

What could go wrong? Just about everything. Even before the slaughter of the first world war, ‘Liberal England was reduced to ashes’. Moderate politicians could not placate the suffragettes or the rising trade unions. They did not know how to cope with the revolt of nationalists and unionists in Ireland or militant conservatism at Westminster. The Liberals rapidly became an irrelevance; a faintly ridiculous party with nothing to say to a modern world dividing between left and right. They lost their majority but clung on in 1910. By 1923, Labour had overtaken them as the main opposition to the Conservatives. By 1951, a party which had ruled a mighty empire was reduced to six seats.

Since that nadir, the Liberals have been on a long march. All those unread pamphlets for the Electoral Reform Society, the scarcely better-read op-eds in the leftish press, the meetings in cold halls, the ‘pavement politics’ about where incinerators should be built and when bins should be emptied, the dirty tricks in by-elections, the loveless marriage to the SDP, the simultaneous appeals to racism in white working-class London and to anti-racism in white upper-middle-class London, the donations from criminals, the assassination of leaders with a regularity that would embarrass the Mafia… all that manoeuvring and foot-slogging were for one reason only: to get back to being a party of power.

Yet no sooner is Nick Clegg deputy prime minister than the ghost of Dangerfield rises from the grave to watch with an ironic eye as Liberal England dies again. Measuring the rate of deterioration will remain an imprecise exercise until the next general election, but the patient’s symptoms look dire. YouGov’s daily poll shows Lib Dem support down from 34 per cent during the height of Cleggmania in the 2010 election campaign to 7 per cent. Its findings, I should add, are controversial. Like the other polls, it appears to have exaggerated Clegg’s support last May. Its critics claim that it has now overcompensated for this by excluding the opinions of too many Lib Dem supporters. Mike Smithson, a polling expert and the most amiable of Lib Dem activists, grows uncharacteristically conspiratorial when he discusses YouGov’s relationship with the staunchly conservative News International. ‘Day in day out these Murdoch-funded polls appear in the Murdoch press, setting the political climate and making the Lib Dems look like losers,’ he mutters. Unfortunately for him, other polling companies put the party’s support at around 12 per cent. The difference in a general election is that between annihilation and devastation.

Leaving the disputes between pollsters aside, not even Nick Clegg’s closest friends deny that he is the most hated politician in Britain. At a student demonstration outside Westminster, I saw a ragged man climb a lamppost and urge the protestors to join him in an obscene chant against Clegg. The crowd in Parliament Square roared as one, united in its loathing, and ecstatic at the chance he had given them to crush a man they had once applauded.

Liberal Democrat politicians are not used to being hated or to having excrement pushed through their letterboxes. Throughout their careers, Question Time audiences have never booed them or satirists torn into them. The worst that those outside politics could say was that they were well-meaning if a little cranky. Now when I approach old Liberal contacts who are in government, there is a discernible pause; a beat as they assess whether I will shout at them like so many other former friends. I am a journalist and make it a point of principle to talk to anyone, even Liberal ministers, and I can sense their relief when I extend a friendly hand.

Clegg is feeling the isolation most severely. ‘We expected to become unpopular when we joined government,’ Evan Harris, the former Liberal MP, told me. ‘Smaller parties in coalition governments always take the blame. But no one predicted the personal attacks on Nick or the collapse in his popularity. It was completely unexpected.’

The Liberals have no right to be surprised. Conservative-minded readers may think that the British liberal-left is good for nothing, but, trust me, we are world leaders when it comes to the vituperative art of denouncing sellouts. The Liberals ought to have known it, because they more than anyone else revelled in deploying the wild language of betrayal against Tony Blair. He had taken Britain to an ‘illegal’ war, they claimed, although no court ever said it was unlawful; he was a ‘liar’ who had knowingly sent British troops to their deaths on a false premise. Now, from Islington to Didsbury, from the BBC to the Guardian, the cry of betrayal the Liberals once directed against Blair is directed against them. The only discernible difference is that it took a decade for Blair to go from being the fresh leader of 1994 to the B:Liar of 2004. In the case of Clegg, it is as if someone has thrown compost accelerator over him, speeding up the process of degeneration from hope to has-been from ten years to ten months.

To triple the tuition fees he and every Liberal Democrat pledged to cap and on occasion abolish has destroyed his credibility to an extent I still do not think the Westminster village understands. It’s not just that students are furious or that middle-class parents are wondering how their children will manage, but that voters with little time for violent demonstrators have even less time after the expenses scandal for politicians who are ‘liars’ — if I may use Liberal Democrat language. He’s finished.

On this basis, the condition of Liberal England seems serious but not fatal. Leaders come and go, particularly in the Liberal Democrats. Already the party’s activists are looking fondly at Clegg’s old rival Chris Huhne. They note that Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams helped Clegg’s career with a patronage that was almost Edwardian in its munificence. Huhne, by contrast, worked his way to the top, a virtue appreciated in a party that has had to scrap for every small gain. More pertinently from the Lib Dem point of view, Huhne is fighting for the climate change cause, and has not been caught in press stings like Vince Cable, or had his honesty impugned like David Laws.

If Clegg falls, the watchful Huhne is well-placed to succeed him and, if it were merely a question of changing personnel, one could see the Lib Dems pulling through. The clash between Asquith and Lloyd George did not destroy the old Liberal party, after all. The tide of history rather than the rivalry of leaders washed away that great Victorian edifice, and brought the new division between left and right. I know that to suggest that same tide is threatening to swamp today’s Liberals is to invite ridicule. For what does it mean to be left- or right-wing in the 21st century? Is a working-class Labour voter suspicious of immigrants more left-wing than a metrosexual Tory from Notting Hill? As I write half the think tanks and political academics in Britain
are producing papers which state that Labour and the Conservatives secured only 65 per cent of the vote between them in 2010 (against 97 per cent in 1951) as proof that the binary division of 20th-century politics is gone for good.

For all their erudition, they fail to see that the two-party system is beginning to reassert itself. The great recession of 2008 is transforming politics in Britain, squeezing the middle ground on which the Liberals stand. Now you believe either that George Osborne’s deflationary policy to reduce the deficit is a disaster falling on those least able to bear it or that it is a necessary response to a national emergency. You believe that the recession was caused either by the folly of the bankers or the extravagance of Gordon Brown. In short, you are either left-wing or right-wing. You must choose, for you cannot be both.

Liberals have spent their whole careers arguing that left and right are illusory concepts, and have been rewarded with the support of millions of voters who agreed. Naturally, they recoil at talk of the old divisions opening up again; for in its implications they sense their own demise. They point to the success of their civil liberties agenda in office, but in their hearts they understand that advances in freedom, worthy though they may be, count for little when set against the great economic arguments of the age. They know they chose the right-wing path when they signed up to Osborne’s budget, although the closest they come to admitting it is when they tell me ‘if the economy goes wrong we’re sunk’, or ‘we couldn’t survive a double dip recession’.

The party’s base, as it turned out, was more ideological than its leaders imagined. Swathes of supporters have realised that they were a part of the centre-left after all, and defected. Labour has had an extraordinary and undeserved stroke of good fortune. It is intellectually exhausted, all but bankrupt, and was until recently led by the most unpopular prime minister in living memory, but the behaviour of Liberal politicians and the despair of Liberal supporters has pushed it into an eight-point lead in this week’s polls. Ed Miliband’s much derided strategy of keeping a low profile does not seem so risible now that protest voters are flocking to the only available opposition.

Douglas Alexander, Labour’s campaign co-ordinator in the 2010 election, told me he saw nothing strange about the Liberals’ death throes. ‘Their voters feel disoriented ideologically by the familiar right-wing agenda the government is pursuing, and genuinely angry about the betrayal of the promise of a new politics done differently.’ Yet Alexander emphasises that however gratifying it is for Labour to receive their support, ‘the demise of the Liberal Democrats will probably be influential but not decisive to the next general election’. If you glance at the seats the Liberals hold, you will see why. Yeovil, Lewes, Kingston and Surbiton, Mid Dorset and North Poole, St Austell and Newquay, Somerton and Frome… these are not constituencies Labour has a prayer of ever winning. The only realistic challenger is the Conservative party. If it stays strong, if the coalition teaches right-leaning liberals that their fears about a nasty Tory government were misplaced and brings them into the Conservative camp, then David Cameron will be the true beneficiary.

I said earlier that the strange death of Liberal England inaugurated an era when the British were either Labour or Conservative. That was true as far it went, but missed the big point — that the Tories took the greater part of the spoils. Labour had only one great reforming administration in 1945 and did not win two consecutive full terms until after Tony Blair took charge in 1997. The 20th century was a conservative century. Labour must win arguments that expand its appeal beyond the disillusioned centre-left voters who once agreed with Nick — or the 21st century will be the same.
Nick Cohen blogs for The Spectator.